Re: Requirements for notes

Alistair,

At 19:16 11/05/2004, you wrote:
>This seems like a good moment to put out a call for suggestions for exactly
>what types of note (e.g. editor-note, hierarchy note) should be supported by
>SKOS-Core, and what each note should contain.

I'm not sure that it's really necessary to try to specify a wide range of 
different possible kinds of notes. This seems to me to be a case where your 
idea of subclassing and inheritance is going to be really useful (the other 
is the different types of hierarchical relationship such as partitive, 
generic, etc.). I think it's important, as Andy suggests, to distinguish 
between public and private notes, since these may be handled in different 
ways, but for the rest, I'm not sure it matters a lot. A scope note, a 
history note, and some kind of internal note are the ones that I have seen 
most often, but others have a lot more experience with this.

I'm still a little concerned about delivering all of these notes every time 
we access a Concept. I would say normally in a _thesaurus_ application at 
least there's a continuum of how often information gets used, something 
like this:

Most often used       Concept identification and label information
         |
         |                       Relationship information (BTs, NTs, RTs)
         V
Least often used      Notes information

The Concept object combines the most often used information with the least 
often used information. Sometimes these notes can be very long (Andy is 
perhaps in a good position to confirm or deny my fears here). So the API 
may be delivering a lot of textual information with Concepts that will only 
be used a very small percentage of the time. Maybe in practice this 
overhead won't matter, but it's an issue perhaps to evaluate.

Ron


Ron Davies
Information and documentation systems consultant
Av. Baden-Powell 1  Bte 2, 1200 Brussels, Belgium
Email:  ron@rondavies.be
Tel:    +32 (0)2 770 33 51
GSM:    +32 (0)484 502 393