- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 04:53:49 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Stella Dextre Clarke <sdclarke@lukehouse.demon.co.uk>
- Cc: 'Bernard Vatant' <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>, "'Miles, AJ (Alistair) '" <A.J.Miles@rl.ac.uk>, public-esw-thes@w3.org
On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Stella Dextre Clarke wrote: >Bernard, >Thanks for the explanation. It seems "subject indicator" is intended to >be more like "example" than like "definition", and I don't have a >problem with this. It could be something like either, depending on use... >There may be a lag, however, before many producers of >thesauri think of taking up this facility. Few of them are likely to >have been following the conversations in the Semantic Web community. So >I guess some time may pass before the idea catches on for widely used >thesauri. I agree - this facility is more likely to be used by people making small thesauri than by professionals who are used to making their own complete thesaurus. But for that community (it includes me, from time to time) I think it is useful to allow pointing to an existing definition that someone else created rather than replicating the work. As Bernard points out, without control over the resource being pointed to people should be clear about how stable it might be, but as a simple example I suspect that a definition in a W3C specification, or something published by the University of Melborne, is likely to be at least as reliable as something I put on a website that is strictly tied to my current ISP contract... And yes, this is a facility that the Semantic Web offers as part of its design. Whether every user decides to take advantage of it doesn't seem as important to me as whether it is something that some people will use, and whether it fits into the overall design framework without storing up problems... cheers Chaals
Received on Tuesday, 28 September 2004 08:53:49 UTC