RE : How to use notations from classification schemes in SKOS

Dear all,

In the project I work for we have made a conversion of the IconClass classification scheme (www.iconclass.nl) to SKOS. That raised a lot of problems, but not the one of notations. ;-)

Notations (such as 25F) are indeed the only things that are supposed to be used to classify the documents. There is a text attached to them (e.g., 'animals'), but this text, though very important (it gives the natural meaning of the subject) will never be used as the real descriptor for images. We had therefore something very comparable to the prefLabel/altLabel distinction.

I think this is a similar case to Lars' one. And from this experience, I would share Andrew's analysis on DDC [1]. Or favor a solution like Mark's one [2], if you really don't want to use prefLabel directly (but then you've got to be sure the loss of genericity/interoperability of your solution is compensated by the added value of using such a specialisation in your system!)


Also a few thoughts about Alistair's proposal [3]. In  principle a proposal for such a new property is interesting, but one should be sure it will be adequately understood and used.

>>>>  - The main purpose of the property is to provide a human-friendly
identifier for the concept, whose value is not a recognisable word or
collocation of words from any natural language.

That can grasp the intended meaning of the notation property, but are you sure that people will not fly away from such a specification ;-) ?

>>>>  - The value should be a typed literal, where the datatype defines both
the scope of reference, and the lexical space of allowed values.

Ok, and that could be a nice added value of such a property.
But beware that people do not waste thinking too much about specifying the acceptable notations: IconClass for example allows only for one or two letters in a notation, in a way that is not easily specifiable even using regular formulas.
The effect would be even worse if designers realize at the end that that was not really useful, or worse, is now preventing them to use standard tools that will work with prefLabel. Perhaps this is similar to Stella's final argument in [4].

Cheers,

Antoine

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2006Feb/0032.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2006Feb/0033.html
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2006Feb/0035.html
[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2006Feb/0040.html