Quick comment from new SKOS user

Hi,
I've just started using SKOS in a project I'm working on, and there's
one thing I found slightly confusing from the outset. Consider two
concepts, C0 and C1, and the statement

C0 skos:narrower C1

I find this ambiguous, since the two readings

"C0 is a narrower concept than C1"

"C0 has the narrower concept C1"

are equally plausible from a simple reading of the statement. If
anything, I find former interpretation slightly more natural, since in
colloquial English when stating a "narrowment" (:-) the narrower thing
usually comes first. E.g:

car narrower garage-door
"My car is fortunately narrower than my garage door"

garage-door narrower car
"My garage-door has-narrower-thing my car"

I know it's a different sense of 'narrow', but still ...

RDFS solves this by adding a preposition to indicate the direction
rdfs:subClassOf, rather than just rdfs:subClass which would have the
same problem. I guess it's too late now to change the actual SKOS
predicate name, but perhaps you could clarify the direction of the
relationship in the documentation.  The same comment applies to
skos:broader, btw.

Apologies if this has come up before. I did take a quick look at the
archive but didn't see anything.

Regards,
Ian

Received on Thursday, 6 January 2005 11:53:15 UTC