RE: Quick Guide to Publishing a Thesaurus on the Semantic Web

Hi Mark,

> - Sorry to be nagging about it, but I think the outcome of the 
> discussion was (as you already state) that conversion is 
> indeed tricky, 
> that conversion is more than XML > save as: SKOS. However, 
> the poit is 
> that  many people do not realize this. And this is exactly the reason 
> why the quick guide would be a good place to help people out of this 
> dream (i.e. early on). I agree it's hard to write a general note, but 
> maybe what we can do is pointing out an example source (XML), example 
> transformation tech (XSLT) with the explicit statement that 
> more issues 
> play a role than we have room for here to explain? You 
> actually already 
> half explain a conversion by the UKAT example (from a text file to 
> RDF/XML), so it fits well with the current text to explain that each 
> UKAT "Term: ..." in the source file needs to be translated to a new 
> "<skoks:Concept ..." node (with a URI, which you may have to 
> introduce 
> yourself).

How about the following after the 'Expressing a Thesaurus in RDF' section (feel free to hack or add suggestions): 

---
Section: Generating an RDF Representation of a Thesaurus

Most thesauri are stored and managed via a relational database.  The best method for generating an RDF representation of a thesaurus from the contents of a relational database will depend on both the technologies deployed and the database schema, and is beyond the scope of this document.  

If an XML representation of the thesaurus is already available, then an RDF/XML representation using SKOS Core may be generated via an XSLT transformation.  The design of this transformation will depend on the original XML format, and care must be taken to ensure sensible output.  

Where a regularly structured textual representation of a thesaurus is available, an RDF representation may be generated via a text processing program script.

In all cases it should be noted that generating and maintaining an RDF representation of a thesaurus requires commitments with respect to URI usage, and careful modelling to ensure that RDF representations conform to the recommended usage of the SKOS Core Vocabular, are sensible, and are consistent with other published forms.
---

> > I wanted to leave the skos:inScheme statement in, because I 
> think it's quite important.  But I changed the text above the 
> RDF/XML box to:
> 
> - Is it then not better to also include text to explain why it's in 
> there, instead of only including it in the syntax?

How about if I add a skos:inScheme arc to the graph instead?

> 
> 
> > Left that, because 'facet' is difficult due to overloaded usage.
> 
> - Didn't know it was overloaded, good to know. Why this is 
> the case, can 
> you give some details?

Yep, see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2004Mar/0066.html and followup in that thread.

Thanks,

Al.

Received on Friday, 1 April 2005 18:08:14 UTC