AW: RE : How to use notations from classification schemes in SKOS

In litteris suis de Dienstag, 14. Februar 2006 18:17,
public-esw-thes-request@w3.org <mailto:public-esw-thes-request@w3.org>
scripsit:

> 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. ;-)
That's good to hear!
> 
> 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.
Can you explain exactly how you solved the problem?
> 
> 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 ;-)
> ?
Indeed it is a bit intimidating...
> 
>>>>>  - 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].

Summing the discussion up, I'd say that Alistair's proposal [1] (thanks
a lot, Alistair! You described it the way I would have done it) would
probably not reach the necessary consensus. The question of course
remains, how to handle this. What would you all say to the invention a
new property skos:notation as a subproperty of both skos:prefLabel and
dc:identifier? This way we could keep the prefLabel unique as stated in
the skos vocabulary specification [2]. Remains what to do with the
caption. Here I'm eager to hear your input. A completely new property,
just skos:altLabel, or a skos:caption as a subproperty of skos:altLabel?


Cheers and thanks for your interest!

Lars


[1]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2006Feb/0035.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-swbp-skos-core-spec-20051102/#prefLabel

-- 
Dr. Lars G. Svensson
Die Deutsche Bibliothek
Informationstechnik / Projekt DDC-Deutsch
Tel.: 069 / 1525 - 1752
http://www.ddc-deutsch.de

Received on Wednesday, 15 February 2006 08:46:37 UTC