RE : altLabels in different langauges

Hello,

I think there was a (very) small misunderstanding. I especially wanted to react to Alistair's proposal (let's call it AnnotationLink-as-class), which seemed too complex to me, or at least too complex to prefer it to the Term-as-class one without further investigation.
 
>> I see 2 possible problems:
>> - one obvious is the complexity of the thing for the humans involved in
>> the loop. Of course we always claim that this is not the core of
>> semantic web concerns, but a model which is cognitively inadequate will
>> be difficult to adopt.

>I agree this is a concern in general.

>But in terms of complexity SKOS is much closer to FOAF (arguably the 
>most used schema and probably one of the simplest schemas we can expect 
>to appear on the SW) than to e.g. (Onto)WordNet, or e.g. the toy-example 
>Wine ontology [3]. If we cannot explain people how to correctly use SKOS 
>- only 5 classes and 26 properties - then we can just quit with the 
>Semantic Web now anyway.

I would also be very dispapointed. And indeed I think the Term-as-class would perhaps still be simple enough. But the AnnotationLink-as-class

>> in reasoning engines. What if you want state that your translation is
>> symmetric (if X has Y as a translation, Y has X as a translation)? You

>Why couldn't you use owl:SymmetricProperty ?

In the Term-as-class solution you can use that, indeed. But not in the AnnotationLink-as-class one, where you have these "source" and "target" properties.

>> when the model is created. Similar problems could happen if you want to
>> create transitive 'links' between your terms (perhaps not valid for

>Why couldn't you use owl:TransitiveProperty ?

Same answer, of course

>What is wrong with adding the triples yourself if you don't use OWL? You 
>have to do that in RDF(S)anyway. Although I think it is usual in the RDF 
>community that the fact which props are transitive is meta-knowledge, 
>and the applications simply have built-in transitivity rules for those 
>props. E.g. hypernymy in WordNet.

I suppose motivated developer/modelers (and I dare say I would be one of them) could consider the addition of triples without much difficulty. But in case of comparable amount of efforts (adding terms instances and related triples vs. adding annotation instances and related triples) I would be reluctant to go for the less natural one and/or the less compatible with existing reasoning mechanisms.

>In any case, what you mention could be limiting factors on the 
>usefulness of the Term approach, but not hinder its basic usefulness as 
>outlined in [2].

Agreed, it's just that I cannot refrain from sending my two cents on this "change proposal" theme.

Antoine