- From: Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>
- Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 10:56:49 +0200
- To: "Leonard Will" <L.Will@willpowerinfo.co.uk>, <public-esw-thes@w3.org>
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