Re: SKOS and MeSH qualifiers

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005, Leonard Will wrote:

> Terms with subdivisions or MeSH-type "qualifiers" are really
> pre-coordinated strings made up of two or more thesaurus concepts. The
> syntax and the allowed combinations for these strings would normally be
> incorporated in rules for pre-coordination which are separate from the
> elementary concepts and their labels in the thesaurus itself.
>
> [ snipped ]
>
> I would suggest that all concepts such as these should be recorded
> independently as separate entries in the thesaurus and be available for
> assignment to documents in addition to other "subject" terms.
>
> [ snipped ]
>
Perhaps I am missing something otherwise self-evident in Leonard
Will's assessment of this issue, but with MeSH, the "qualifiers" are
not assigned to documents but to specific terms assigned to a document.
For example, a document might be indexed with the following MeSH terms,
with the appropriate qualifiers following in brackets:

  Articulation Disorders [etiology;therapy]
  Down Syndrome [complications]
  Leukemia, Lymphocytic, Acute [complications;drug therapy;pathology]

As such, the document could certainly be found by searching for the
qualifier "complications", but a post-coordinated search for "Articulation
Disorders" restricted by the MeSH qualifier "complications" would be
inappropriate.

If this can be done in SKOS using the concepts of facets
(owl:Restriction?)  then so much the better, but I don't have enough
experience to see it.

-- Robert

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Robert Watkins
rwatkins@foo-bar.org
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Received on Monday, 11 July 2005 13:42:28 UTC