RE: Quick comment from new SKOS user

Hi Ian, all,

I've always been conscious that the directionality of the skos:broader and
skos:narrower properties is ambiguous if you only consider the property
name.  It is too late to make any changes to the property names now, but I
do think we should make the documentation clearer (i.e. *extremely* clear).
  
Incidentally the rdfs:label for the skos:broader property is 'has broader',
so we put the 'has' into the label but left it out of the local name.  

I thought about adding an rdfs:comment to the description of the
skos:broader and skos:narrower properties specifically to indicate the
directionality, but I've been trying to avoid phrases like 'The skos:broader
predicate implies that the object of the statement is broader than the
subject' which is fine for RDF experienced folks but a bit confusing for
others (I would get 'object' and 'subject' mixed up for a good long while :)

Al.

> -----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 Monday, 10 January 2005 17:20:52 UTC