skos:ConceptScheme suggestion

Hi all,
In a project I'm working on, I refer to a number of different concept
schemes including WordNet, SUMO, and various SKOS-based hierarchies.  I
have generic Swing-based controls that can display these schemes to the
user in a consistent way. To do this, I need to inform the control
component how to, for example, descend the hierarchy.  So in SUMO, the
children of a class node are values of the inverse of rdfs:subClassOf.
For SKOS, the equivalent is in principle skos:narrower, but in practice
it's typically the inverse of skos:broader.  For wordnet, I use inverse
of wordnet:hypernymOf.  Now I could just declare, for instance:

skos:broader rdfs:subPropertyOf rdfs:subClassOf .

and rely on the reasoner to allow me to descend a hierarchy by only
querying against rdfs:subClassOf. This has two problems, though: first,
the semantics of 'broader' may not, in fact, be subsumed by
'subClassOf', and second it's infeasible to do this for an interactive
GUI tool, given the size of my concept hierarchies and the fact that
they're typically stored in a database. 

So what I actually do is to document, in an RDF meta-properties file,
which property names are used in a given concept scheme for narrowing,
broadening, equivalence and instantiating a concept.  I also denote the
topmost concept in the hierarchy. Since this latter feature is one of
the properties of skos:ConceptScheme, I was wondering whether it might
also be useful to include the characteristic concept relations as
standard part of the concept scheme description in SKOS.

This is just a suggestion. If it's inappropriate for the goals (or
timescales) of SKOS I won't be offended :-)

Regards,
Ian

_____________________________________________________________________
Ian Dickinson   HP Labs, Bristol, UK      mailto:ian.dickinson@hp.com
net www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Ian_Dickinson       ph +44 (117) 312 8796

Received on Tuesday, 11 January 2005 10:39:11 UTC