Re: question concerning collections

Hi Leonard,

I think SKOS using the word 'Collection' is fine as long as the 
connection with node labels is made clear, which I think the Guide does. 
Collection is a more technical term which links it nicely to its use 
from a technical perspective.

We only have to choose one of the solutions to prevent them from being 
inferred to be concepts...

Cheers,
Mark.

Leonard Will wrote:
> 
> In message <447AFD2A.6060603@mondeca.com> on Mon, 29 May 2006, Bernard 
> Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com> wrote
>> Bottom line : maybecurrent specification is a bit unclear about 
>> collections, the core issue being not to know if they should be blank 
>> nodes or not, but to make clear if and why skos:Collection and 
>> skos:Concept are disjoint classes, if they indeed should be (of which 
>> I remain to be fully convinced), and what the notion of "collectable 
>> property" actually means.
> 
> "Collection" is the rather unfortunate term adopted by SKOS for one type 
> of what the thesaurus standard BS8723 calls a "node label", specifically 
> a node label which contains a "characteristic of division", showing the 
> basis on which the following array of concepts has been grouped.  In the 
> example being discussed here, "milk by source animal" is a label saying 
> that the concepts listed under it are grouped by source animal.
> 
> According to the standard, node labels are not, and do not represent, 
> concepts. "They are present only for the purposes of systematic display, 
> and they do not qualify for any of the inter-term relationships . . ."
> 
> "Milk by source animal" is not a narrower term of "milk", and it is not 
> a broader term of "buffalo milk", and any semantic structure should not 
> imply these relationships.
> 
> The problem is that most standard thesaurus management software does not 
> have the functionality to handle these node labels properly, but 
> treating them as though they were concepts does generally allow 
> reasonably correct displays. This is clearly a fudge, which should not 
> be perpetuated in SKOS.
> 
> I realise that using the standard thesaurus / classification 
> nomenclature of "array" and "node label" may cause confusion in the 
> semantic web / ontology / computing community, where these terms may 
> have different meanings or connotations, but I hope that some compromise 
> may be possible. Certainly there needs to be a distinction between the 
> set of concepts grouped under a label and the label itself.
> 
> Leonard Will
> 

-- 
  Mark F.J. van Assem - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
        markREMOVE@cs.vu.nl - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mark

Received on Monday, 29 May 2006 15:05:01 UTC