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

I regret not making it to Vienna, but hope to get to ISKO next summer. Back
to the problem of multiple concepts covered by the same term:
This is an artifact of termologies that has traditionally been illegal in
thesauri because of the different objectives of the two systems.
Terminological resources traditionally document real language in a
discipline. While mononymy and monosemy (univocality) are desireable in
standardized terminology, descriptive approaches recognize that homonymy and
polysemy abound, even in specialized subject fields. Constraing references,
subject as multiple subfield notations (similar to scopes) are widely used
to clarify the semantics involved.
 Moving back to the notion of extensions: Alan Melby and I have been working
on just that concept, of proposing a terminology extension that would enable
a kind of crosswalk between terminological concept systems and SKOS. Laurent
Romary is working on something similar. ISO TC 37 is initiating a new
concept system standard which will undoubtedly pickup this issue and carry
it further.
 I'm glad Stella cited the BSI draft BS8723, which is being elaborated more
or less in parallel with the NISO Z39.19. I'm very concerned that we
recognize all the traditions out there and account for differences in
approach. It's important to recognize some of the terminological and
methodological differences that occur between communities of practice and
not to be judgmental when comparing them. By the same token, a great deal
can be gained in the long run with respect to information retrieval and
manipulation if we can indeed translate differences into interoperable
extensions and crosswalks.
 Bye for now
Sue Ellen
 Bye for now
Sue Ellen

 On 10/10/05, Leonard Will <L.Will@willpowerinfo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> 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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>


--
Sue Ellen Wright
Institute for Applied Linguistics
Kent State University
Kent OH 44242 USA
sellenwright@gmail.com
swright@kent.edu
sewright@neo.rr.com