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

Alistair

> >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'.

Leonard

> 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.

Things are not that simple in dmoz IMO ... Agreed, dmoz concepts such as
Top: Society: Religion and Spirituality: Christianity: Music
look like pre-coordinated in the URL of the category
[1] http://dmoz.org/Society/Religion_and_Spirituality/Christianity/Music/
But this pre-coordination also includes a broader-narrower hierarchy, since the above is a
subcategory of
[2] http://dmoz.org/Society/Religion_and_Spirituality/Christianity/

But if you look at the display at [2], the label of [1] is "Music"

> 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.

Hmm, not sure I agree with that. Look at
[3] http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Music/

[1] and [3] don't seem to be related anyway. [3] declares a "See Also" link to :
[4] http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/
... where you find a "link@" (which is to be interpreted as "narrower") to [3] but not to
[2].

Agreed, this is just an example of how sloppy dmoz organisation is, but in a SKOS
expression of DMOZ "as is", would you declare Music in [1], [3] and [4] as the *same*
concept? And in this case, would you need this concept to be declared independently of any
pre-coordination context? Music as neither an expression of spirituality, nor a product,
nor a form of art ... is declared nowhere in the vocabulary. Looks to me like a use case
for "semantic superposition" [5] or "hubjects" [6].

> 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.

The problem here is, as said above, the "Music" concept is nowhere explicitly declared in
dmoz. Not sure about it, when you use pre-coordination, is the usual practice to use
elements declared as standalone concepts in the vocabulary?

More generally, would you consider all of 590 000+ (!) categories of dmoz (current count
declared on the home page) as pre-coordinated terms, except the 15 Top ones such as "Arts"
defined by http://dmoz.org/Arts/? Then you have the same kind of issues with most of them
as for "Music". The pre-coordination elements are nowhere declared standalone (except the
Top ones).

$0.02 from a (very intermittent) DMOZ editor
http://dmoz.org/profiles/universimmedia.html

Bernard

[5] http://universimmedia.blogspot.com/2005/08/schrdingers-web.html
[6] http://universimmedia.blogspot.com/2005/06/wheel-and-hub.html

Received on Tuesday, 11 October 2005 08:57:02 UTC