RE: lexical relationships

Not sure why this is coming up now, as I thought you had preflabel and
altlabel pretty much worked out. And for me this pair is the same as
USE/UF in a thesaurus, which we can also spell out as  the equivalence
relationship between terms (not concepts).

ISO 2788 points out that USE/UF can be used to cover several different
situations. These include:
- common versus scientific names (e.g. Rosa canina, dog rose)
- common versus trade names (hoovers, vacuum cleaners)
- full name versus abbreviation (VAT, value added tax)
- synonyms with different linguistic origin (freedom, liberty)
- spelling variants (ground water, groundwater; oedema,edema)
- irregular singular/plurals (goose, geese)
- and others (see ISO 2788)
ISO 2788 does not prohibit you from treating these as subdivisions and
giving them separate tags or designations. Some thesauri do this,
especially in the case of abbreviations. It is good to give people the
flexibility to do this, just as with subdividing BT/NT into BTG/NTG,
BTI/NTI, etc.  But unless there is some good housekeeping reason, it
seems to me like a lot of trouble for little reward.

And why treat lexical variants as different from all the rest? They can
be very useful indeed for retrieval purposes. I don't think we should
think of them as being "not semantic" because that implies that the
others ARE semantic, and that is questionable. Even in the case of
freedom versus liberty, remember that in the thesaurus these are
considered to be two alternative labels for one and the same concept. If
there is only one concept, how can there be a semantic difference?

A stronger case can be made for separating out any lexical "variants"
that are actually misspellings, e.g. abatoirs. These can be useful in
retrieval, but they look a bit offensive and the editor may wish to hide
them from view. 

So I'd say that subdividing this relationship has rather less urgency
than subdividing BT/NT or RT/RT. But do include the lexical variants
with the other synonyms.

Stella


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Stella Dextre Clarke
Information Consultant
Luke House, West Hendred, Wantage, Oxon, OX12 8RR, UK
Tel: 01235-833-298
Fax: 01235-863-298
SDClarke@LukeHouse.demon.co.uk
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-----Original Message-----
From: public-esw-thes-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-esw-thes-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Miles, AJ
(Alistair) 
Sent: 06 October 2004 16:19
To: 'public-esw-thes@w3.org'
Subject: lexical relationships



This is just to guage interest in doing this kind of thing in SKOS Core
...

Are we interested in being able to represent things like spelling
variant relationships, abbreviation relationships, literal translation
relationships, in SKOS Core?

I group these under the label 'lexical relationships' because they seem
different from 'semantic relationships', although a lexical relationship
may not be completely independent of the sense of the terms involved.

Also, this stuff seems pretty close to wordnet.

???

Al.

---
Alistair Miles
Research Associate
CCLRC - Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Building R1 Room 1.60
Fermi Avenue
Chilton
Didcot
Oxfordshire OX11 0QX
United Kingdom
Email:        a.j.miles@rl.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1235 445440

Received on Thursday, 7 October 2004 12:08:15 UTC