Re: Comments on SKOS Core Guide & Quick Guide

On Tue, Jan 11, 2005 at 05:47:09PM +0100, Mark van Assem wrote:
> A general comment is that I'm curious about the relationship of SKOS to
> standards (e.g. for thesauri). For example, was ISO 2788 an inspiration?
> Why have some things from ISO gone in SKOS Core and others not (e.g.
> compound terms)? Reference is made to BS8723. Is this a standard of the 
> British Standards group (http://www.bsi-global.com)? I haven't been able 
> to find a standard with this code on that website.

Mark's point is consistent with what I was driving at in my
own review [1]:

>   But is the SKOS Core Guide really primarily about a
>   vocabulary?  Or is it really about a particular data
>   model based, in turn, on the RDF model?  Reducing SKOS
>   Core to the vocabulary alone seems a bit like reducing
>   RDF to "The RDF Vocabulary".  Saying that SKOS Core is a
>   "supporting" vocabulary makes one ask: supporting what?
>
>   Rather, describing SKOS Core as a "model" for expressing
>   knowledge organization structures such as thesauri could
>   perhaps correct this narrow perspective, shifting the
>   reader's attention to the model of entities being described
>   ("skos:Concepts" and relationships between them) and how
>   the vocabulary "supports" that model.

In other words, one might repackage SKOS not primarily as a
"vocabulary" but as a "thesaurus model".  In presenting that
model, the documentation could specify how the SKOS model
relates to the ISO and BSI standards cited above.

Shifting the emphasis from the "vocabulary" to the "model"
might help avoid some of the confusion involved in describing
a vocabulary (SKOS Core) that is used to describe vocabularies
(the thesauri)...

Tom

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swbp-wg/2004Dec/0117.html

-- 
Dr. Thomas Baker                        Thomas.Baker@izb.fraunhofer.de
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Received on Monday, 17 January 2005 08:26:14 UTC