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

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