Re: candidate and deprecated concepts

In message
<350DC7048372D31197F200902773DF4C05E50C9C@exchange11.rl.ac.uk> on Mon,
11 Oct 2004, "Miles, AJ (Alistair)" <A.J.Miles@rl.ac.uk> wrote
>Within a semantic web context I think it makes better sense to think of the
>first step being for an authority (or individual) to publish a set of concepts.
>Concept schemes may then be described a posteriori to include all or
>some of these published concepts.  This allows for schemes to be
>described that include concepts from multiple sources.  I.e. a concept has
>an existence and a publication status that is independent of the schemes
>(or scheme versions) which it participates in.

I think it would be difficult to publish a set a concepts "in the
abstract" without any implicit relationships between them, whether you
call this a "scheme" or not. The problem is that the usual way of
defining a concept is to say what broader concept it is a member of, and
then specify the ways in which it is differentiated from other members
of that broader concept.

E.g.    "A child is_a person less than 18 years old"
        "An insect is_an invertebrate with a jointed body and six legs"
        "Physics is_a science which deals with matter and energy"

Thus in the act of defining concepts you define hierarchical
relationships to other concepts. You may be able to specify additional
relationships of all kinds between concepts to make a more complex
scheme, but that is additonal to the hierarchy inherent in the
definitions.

Leonard

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Received on Monday, 11 October 2004 19:56:35 UTC