Re: [Proposal][SKOS-Core] skos:denotes

Miles, AJ (Alistair) wrote:

>>Ah I hadn't realize they were expected to be disjoint. I nearly wrote 
>>earlier that it you could simply have the bNode 
>>Al-as-foaf-Person also be 
>>an instance of skos:Concept. Then it could, for example, be directly 
>>attached to a thesaurus without this extra level of 
>>indirection and use 
>>owl:sameAs to indicate these correspondences.
> 
> 
> The big problem with doing this is that multiple concepts from different
> sources could end up being merged as the same node in a graph ... which
> could leave you with a concept node with three different definitions and any
> number of labels, and no knowledge (without provenance) of which source the
> labels/definitions came from.

Well you often need provenance to work with merged data anyway but I agree 
there are advantages to keeping the chunks separate rather than relying on 
provenance machinery.

However, it seems like the core argument behind the approach is not the 
mechanics of merging but the nature of modeling.

All of these representation systems are approximations. A skos Concept and 
an rdfs Class may both capture different nuances about the same thing [*]. 
You want some way of saying that. It can't carry any semantics but it is 
useful. However, in that case it seems to me the relationship is 
"denotesTheSameAs" which is why your phrasing of "correspondence" works 
better for me than denotes. In particular, this seems to me to be quite 
symmetric. You might want to say that two different skos Concepts from 
different thesauri also denote the same thing. It need not be a specific 
SKOS -> RDFS/OWL mapping. I think it was the asymmetry that I didn't like.

Dave

[*] I would use "real world thing" here but that would just get it confused 
with that subclass of things that hurt your toe when you kick them ...

Received on Wednesday, 29 September 2004 16:26:00 UTC