Re: Quick Guide to Publishing a Thesaurus on the Semantic Web

Mark,

At 13:21 4/05/2005, Mark van Assem wrote:
>But come to think of it, of course these may be/are just output files from 
>the actual thesaurus man'ment system.

I think, though I'm not sure in all the cases you cite, that that is correct.

>Are there reasons why you think man'ment in XML is not or will not happen?

No, other than there are not yet any XML-based applications as far as I 
know. As/when/if XML databases become common, I'm sure that someone will 
build a thesaurus application on top of one of those databases. But I don't 
know of any yet.

>The point I was trying to make with the sentence "warrant naming this 
>explicitly" is that when converting we may have to deal with different 
>formats, regardless of how the thesaurus is managed (e.g. because only
>the XML version is made public, or it is more convenient than the DB version).

I think talking about converting from XML or text output is entirely 
reasonable (even though in many cases it might be easier to go back and do 
it from the underlying database or relational tables if you can get access 
to them). I was only objecting to the assumption that thesauri are simply 
stored in XML or text format, which might lead innocent readers to assume 
that that was a good way (or even a possible way!) to do things. I think 
Alistair's text is still open a little to this mis-interpretation, but it's 
clearer than it was, and probably not worth fussing any more with.

Regards,

Ron