RE: Territorial Units Thesaurus

Javier,
In a thesaurus, the usual solution to your first problem is to add a
qualifier in parentheses that distinguishes between the different
locations. In the UK, for example, there are said to be approximately 21
different towns called 'Newport'. When we need to name them in a
thesaurus, we call one of them 'Newport (Gwent)', another is 'Newport
(Devon)', and so on. Gwent and Devon are the names of the counties in
which the towns are situated. A similar situation arises with Dublin
(Ohio) and Dublin (Ireland). If the purpose of the thesaurus is to
assist information retrieval, then the fact that the preflabel is not
the "officially correct" name of the town does not matter. ( But if it
were necessary to inform users what the correct name was, that could be
done by adding an extra field with the information.) See ISO 2788.
All the best
Stella

*****************************************************
Stella Dextre Clarke
Information Consultant
Luke House, West Hendred, Wantage, Oxon, OX12 8RR, UK
Tel: 01235-833-298
Fax: 01235-863-298
SDClarke@LukeHouse.demon.co.uk
*****************************************************



-----Original Message-----
From: public-esw-thes-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-esw-thes-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Javier Lacasta
Sent: 25 October 2005 09:33
To: public-esw-thes@w3.org
Subject: Territorial Units Thesaurus



Hi all,

In the process of creation in SKOS of the territorial thesaurus of Spain

and France, we have fount two problems about how to represent some 
characteristics related with the preflabel property.

First:

The comments of the preflabel property says: "/No two concepts in the 
same concept scheme may have the same value for skos:prefLabel in a 
given language."/

But for a territorial thesaurus there are different places with the same

name (for example, two cities with the same name in different provinces)
I think this is not a problem if the two concept have different 
identifiers, that depends of the kind of thesausus that is being 
created, in some of them  the repetition of preflabels is not 
recomendable but in others should be posible.

Second:

In the territorial units thesausus, we have a label that is the "oficial

name" of a place, that can be in different languages for different 
cities in the same country. For some of hte places there is translation 
of that label to the other official languages of the conuntry but for 
others there is not translation and the "oficial name".
We consider that label the default label to return when there is not 
translation in the language we are aking for, but we dont have clear how

to represent that label.

Our alternative is to put the "oficial name" as a preflabel without 
language (considering it a kind of default preflabel) and the 
translations as preflabels with language property, but we are not sure 
if this aproach is valid in SKOS.

Example:
<skos:prefLabel>ILLES BALEARS</skos:prefLabel>  (Oficial name)
<skos:prefLabel xml:lang="es">ISLAS BALEARES</skos:prefLabel>
(Translations)

Thanks in advance,
Javier

-- 
----------------------------------------------------
Javier Lacasta Miguel
Departamento de Informática e Ingeniería de Sistemas
Centro Politécnico Superior, Universidad de Zaragoza
Edificio Ada Byron, María de Luna, 1
E-50018 Zaragoza, España
Tf: 976 76 21 34
Fax: 976 76 19 14
mailto: jlacasta@unizar.es
http://iaaa.cps.unizar.es/
----------------------------------------------------

Received on Tuesday, 25 October 2005 20:33:36 UTC