Re: Concept spaces and Namespaces RE: Glossary of terms ...

On Tue, 18 Jan 2005, Mark van Assem wrote:

>Salut from me too,
>
>> I think that it is not a good idea for the SKOS specification to try and
>> equate a namespace with a set of concepts described as a "scheme". If I want
>
>If I understand namespaces correctly, they are only a way to provide
>unique names. If so, a particular namespace is not a "coherent" set of
>classes and properties. (Although this usually is the case, a namespace
>does not imply this.) The SKOS "concept scheme/space" does have this
>stronger meaning (if I interpret the spec correctly).

Right. In particular, if I am a user, I might want to create a SKOS
collection of concepts/terms, which is mostly built from existing ones that
are identified by URIs that happen to have two or three "namespaces". I don't
see any reason to make a new namespace to duplicate these in a single place,
beyond aesthetic beauty for people who are perverse enoughto want to read
the underlying code rather than just get on with their real work of using the
collection.

>>>name *inside the concept space* before being ported to the RDF format. So an obvious
>>>migration practice will certainly be to use a single RDF namespace to somehow represent
>>>the concept space. I don't know if that should be recommended by the specification, or
>
>Probably it is a good practice, but if the above argument holds, the
>concept scheme and inScheme property are still needed to provide the
>stronger meaning of a coherent set.

I think the argument that the SKOS stuff is necessary is strong. Further,
there is no good reason I can see why I should not be able to use the same
namespace prefix for my SKOS collection, my ontology for discussing medieval
cookery, and a couple of extension terms I might write to refine Inkel's
vocabulary dealing with the languages people speak. The URI is just a string
used to provide a unique name, right?

cheers

Chaals

Received on Tuesday, 18 January 2005 16:15:11 UTC