Re: merging and mapping

Clearly Leonard and I (and to some extent Alistair and I) are currently
looking from different perspectives. I don't see any point in a mapping
unless it is to allow use of two vocabularies as if they are merged (an
artifact of RDF is that as soon as we have a mapping we can treat these
things as merged).

As I understand it one of the important features of the work is the ability
to do this mapping (although it isn't kept in the same namespace, it is a
requirement, and it is certainly the basis of my interest in this).

I maintain that one of the use cases that makes the SKOS work interesting is
the parallel work on mapping, and that we should ensure that we don' break
this.

I therefore think that we should separate what we consider Best Practice (for
example having the same label as possibly referring to two concepts is
generally a bad idea) from making something absolutely incorrect when there
is reason to believe that it will arise in practice due to sensible work. So
I would continue to suppport the idea that things are "strong usage
recommendations" (but not encoded in the ontology definition frameworks),
rather than seeking to outlaw them by specifying appropriate RDF/OWL
constraints.

Cheers

Chaals

On Mon, 15 Mar 2004, Miles, AJ (Alistair)  wrote:

>> Chaals raises the issue of merging different vocabularies. I
[snip]
>> above applies there too.  As the present SKOS draft doesn't cover
>> questions of mapping between vocabularies, I think we should
>> keep it to
>> what is necessary and desirable for a single vocabulary.
>>
> I think 'merging' and 'mapping' are completely different scenarios.  In
>mapping, the schemes are kept separate, and linked via mapping statements.
>In merging, a new scheme is created by combining concepts from different
>sources.
>
>It's worth considering the situations where separate groups of people (part
>of a larger community) are responsible for contributing concepts as part of
>a larger scheme.  In this scenario we may expect to find overlap of labels.

Received on Monday, 15 March 2004 09:16:54 UTC