- From: Mark van Assem <mark@cs.vu.nl>
- Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 16:38:42 +0100
- To: Thomas Baker <thomas.baker@bi.fhg.de>
- CC: "Miles, AJ (Alistair)" <A.J.Miles@rl.ac.uk>, public-esw-thes@w3.org
Hi Tom, I agree that conversions are tricky, but isn't an important reason for designing SKOS to be able to convert existing thesauri to the Semantic Web? I'm not suggesting automated procedures, merely pointers to technology/tools/guidelines people might use to design a conversion for their specific case. My suggestion for a "conversion" section is based on the idea that people that are interested in the (Quick) Guide, are interested because they (a) want to know if there are benefits of an RDF version of a thesaurus and (b) aren't experts so would like pointers on how to do conversion. So maybe I have a wrong idea of the intended audience, what is your view on this? Mark. > Mark, > > Hmm, it feels to me that the notion of converting between XML > and RDF automatically opens a can of worms. For starters, > what is an "XML version of a thesaurus"? Such a document > could presumably take on any number of forms since the document > models expressible in XML are theoretically quite diverse. > > Since your posting, Pete Johnston has published a draft > explanation for why XML elements cannot necessarily be used as > RDF properties [1], summarizing a discussion that has recently > come to a head on the dc-architecture list. > > My gut feeling is that conversion is something that could be > entrusted to algorithms only if the source XML and the model > expressed thereby already followed well-defined modeling > conventions. That seems like a risky assumption. > > Tom > > [1] http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/dc-elem-prop/ > -- Mark F.J. van Assem - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam mark@cs.vu.nl - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mark
Received on Friday, 25 February 2005 15:38:47 UTC