- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Sat, 1 May 2004 06:24:37 -0400
- To: Leonard Will <L.Will@willpowerinfo.co.uk>
- Cc: public-esw-thes@w3.org
* Leonard Will <L.Will@willpowerinfo.co.uk> [2004-05-01 11:03+0100] > > In message <byJeXABEE3kAFAa1@light.demon.co.uk> on Sat, 1 May 2004, > Richard Light <richard@light.demon.co.uk> wrote > >Assuming that the machine-readable description of the thesaurus concept > >contains similarly-formatted references to its "neighbouring" concepts > >(or that there is a form of query you can issue which returns "all > >concepts with a link to this one"), then you can browse up and down the > >thesaurus tree structure from the starting concept by issuing multiple > >requests - if that is what you wish to do. > > Yes, and if the browsing is being done by a human there should also be > provision for browsing up and down > (1) an alphabetical list of terms, starting at any specified point, and > (2) a list of terms containing a given character string. I doubt we can specify the human-readable offerings of thesaurus providers in such detail, beyond noting best practice conventions and common useful UI conventions. What we can do, though, is take these as use cases for evaluating the _machine_ interface defined in the SKOS API. We can ask ourselves whether such a UI could be built against any/all SKOS servers that meet the API. This opens up the prospect of write-once, re-use elsewhere thesaurus browsing tools... Regarding this specific proposal, it might be worth thinking about how "an alphabetical list of terms" works in an internationalised context. Do all scripts (eg. Japanese kanji, kana?) define a sort order? How about datasets that mix Japanese with English (multilingual thesauri, etc.)? cheers, Dan
Received on Saturday, 1 May 2004 06:24:37 UTC