RE: Quick comment from new SKOS user

Ian,

Point taken, I accept that there is an ambiguity - there
has been a long history of different names for this most
fundamental of thesaurus relationships in SKOS and its
predecessors!

The interpretation we have settled on :

C0 skos:narrower C1
=
"C0 has the narrower concept C1"

is more natural if you think of it "operationally" in the 
directed labelled graph.  To answer the query:
"From concept C0 find me all its narrower concepts". 
then you follow all the skos:narrower properties from C0.
With the other interpretation, you would follow the skos:broader,
which would seem odd!

The versions of SKOS Core guide
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/1.0/guide/#3.7.1
and
http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core/guide/2004-11-25.html
demonstrates how the property should be interpreted.

Brian



> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-esw-thes-request@w3.org
> [mailto:public-esw-thes-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of 
> Dickinson, Ian John
> (HP Labs, Bristol, UK)
> Sent: 06 January 2005 11:53
> To: public-esw-thes@w3.org
> Subject: 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 12:13:11 UTC