shos:indexingRule ? Re: Side question : mapping OWL classes to SKOS concepts

Antoine, Jakob

Jakob Voss a écrit :
> I like SKOS because it can be used for subject
> indexing without making things too complicated.
>   
+1

Antoine's proposal makes sense of course technically speaking, and we 
have thought about this kind of solution in Mondeca. But in architecture 
terms, in the long run it does not seem a good idea to have indexing 
rules declared inside the ontology. The ontology is better off keeping 
agnostic on the way its instances will be indexed, and moreover they can 
be indexed different ways against different concept schemes. So I prefer 
the modular approach proposed in an earlier message by Jakob to have the 
indexing rules in SPARQL (or any other relevant query or rule language) 
specified outside the ontology.
But following up with this idea, and the other way round of Antoine's 
proposal, the concept scheme itself could integrate the declaration of  
its indexing rules, in the form of some equivalent for machines of 
skos:scopeNote, which conveys, if you look closely, some sort of 
indexing rule for humans.
So something like skos:indexingRule, which could contain a formal 
indexing rule in whatever syntax. I've in mind full-text indexing 
engines we are currently working with (Verity, Lucene ...) which use 
their specific rule language (boolean rules, whatever). They will not 
shift to SPARQL or OWL easily, but they will more easily willing to 
represent their taxonomies/classifications/index as SKOS concept schemes 
if we provide them with a way to wrap their own rules in some attribute 
of skos:Concept, like

<skos:Concept rdf:about = ...>
    ...
    <skos:indexingRule>
       [my indexing rule in whatever syntax goes here]
    </skos:indexingRule>
    ...
</skos:Concept>

Bottom line : SKOS is certainly the best tool at hand for costless 
migration to SW of existing technology which do not require any of the 
expressive power of OWL, and don't want to jump in it right now. With 
the above proposal, you can mix up a simple SW structure with non-SW but 
nevertheless effective and powerful indexing tools. Actually the same 
SKOS concept scheme could declare either or both SW rules, e.g. in 
SPARL, to index content with RDF metadata, and non-SW rules, to index 
classical content through full-text search.

Forcing existing technologies to go through complete OWL migration 
before starting to play in SW field makes a too steep adoption curve, 
and is certainly the best way to make them fly away.

Or so I think ...

-- 

*Bernard Vatant
*Knowledge Engineering
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*Mondeca**
*3, cité Nollez 75018 Paris France
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Mail:     bernard.vatant@mondeca.com <mailto:bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>
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Received on Thursday, 9 November 2006 10:24:28 UTC