Re: [PORT] new editor's working draft of SKOS Core Vocab Spec

In message 
<677CE4DD24B12C4B9FA138534E29FB1D0ACDBB@exchange11.fed.cclrc.ac.uk> on 
Mon, 10 Oct 2005, "Miles, AJ (Alistair)" <A.J.Miles@rl.ac.uk> wrote
>So an interesting case is the comment on the skos:prefLabel property 
>[1] which says:
>
>'No two concepts in the same concept scheme may have the same value for 
>skos:prefLabel in a given language.'
>
>This is one of the few places where SKOS Core makes a recommendation 
>wrt best practice in construction/design of a concept scheme.  We've 
>previously avoided doing this for the reasons that Mikael so clearly 
>describes below.
>
>This 'constraint' comes directly from the thesaurus tradition. 
>However, what's interesting is that new styles of user interaction, 
>mediated via computer systems with graphical user interfaces, is 
>challenging the absolute necessity of this constraint. One example I 
>saw recently was the 'metadata++' presentated by Marianne Lykke Nielsen 
>at NKOS 2005 in Vienna [2], where effectively multiple concepts are 
>allowed to have the same preferred lexical label, and meaning is 
>disambiguated by the semantic (hierarchical) context of the concept.
>
>This is very similar to e.g. DMOZ, where the categories...
>
>Society: Religion and Spirituality: Christianity: Music
>Arts: Television: Programs: Music
>Games: Video Games: Music
>
>... are obviously quite different, but all could be modelled as 
>concepts with the same preferred lexical label 'Music'.

Be careful here not to confuse hierarchical relationships such as

sound > music > popular music

with a pre-coordinated string of distinct concepts which are not 
hierarchically related, such as the ones you quote from DMOZ.

In each of the strings you quote, the word "music" labels the _same_ 
concept, which may be defined as some sort of rhythmic or melodic sound 
(at least in my opinion!). The fact that that concept may be combined 
with other concepts in an indexing string does not make it a different 
concept.

In a thesaurus, a concept may have more than one broader term, and in a 
classification scheme such as that of DMOZ a concept may appear in more 
than one context, as you have shown, but it would create havoc if a 
single undifferentiated label was used to stand for more than one 
distinct concept.

Leonard

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Received on Monday, 10 October 2005 22:33:28 UTC