RE: A new proposal for ISSUE-39 ConceptualMappingLinks

Antoine,
Brief responses below. 
Stella

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Stella Dextre Clarke
Information Consultant
Luke House, West Hendred, Wantage, Oxon, OX12 8RR, UK
Tel: 01235-833-298
Fax: 01235-863-298
SDClarke@LukeHouse.demon.co.uk
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> Hi Leonard, Stella,
> 
> I assume from your contributions that there is clear 
> requirement for a 
> skos:relatedMatch.
Agreed.

> 
> Now the problem is with overlappingMatch. In the light of your 
> contribution, I would propose to *drop overlappingMatch*, for the two 
> following reasons:
> - having the two in the vocabulary would cause confusion for 
> SKOS users: 
> shall they use relatedMatch or overlappingMatch? In this respect 
> Margherita's mail [1]  is very useful: if overlappingMatch is 
> allowed, 
> it's difficult to understand the motivation for relatedMatch, and 
> reciprocally.
> - it is actually possible that the usual interpretation of 
> relatedMatch 
> is (or can be made) broad enough to cope with most situation where 
> "overlapping" would be thought of.
Agreed.

> 
> The only situation where I can think of problem is when applications 
> deal with purely extension-based links that have no clear 
> thesaurus-like 
> semantic link, like the "France"/"war" I used in [2]. But 
> even if this 
> kind of link cannot be made relatedMatch (which can also be 
> argued, in 
> fact) we can hypothesize that these would be very specific 
> applications. 
> And we would encourage them to define their own 
> relationships. Which by 
> the way they are likely to do, if they focus only on 
> documents, e.g. by 
> introducing different levels of extensional overlap (30%, 50%, etc)
Relationships defined on the basis of a particular document set or
collection or pair of collections have some very useful applications, it
seems to me, but these are different from what I imagine SKOS is
generally for. If a relationship is a "property" of pairs/groups of
concepts within a scheme, and a mapping is the same type of thing
applying to pairs/groups of concepts where the concepts come from more
than one scheme, then a match that takes into account the occurrence in
a document collection is a property of this system as a whole, that is
to say, it is a property relating to
one-or-more-schemes-plus-one-or-more-document-collections. So the
document collection(s) to which it is being applied need to be included
in the scope statement of the data being communicated. And that makes it
all more complicated. Furthermore, the applications where statistical
occurrence data are useful tend to be free text applications, whereas I
think of SKOS concepts as useful mostly in the context of indexed
collections. Sorry, no time to express this carefully and rigorously,
but I hope the general drift of the argument makes sense.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Antoine
> 
> 
> [1] 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2007Dec/0022.html
> [2] 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2007Dec/0007.html
> 
> >
> > On Fri, 7 Dec 2007 at 15:43:48, Stella Dextre Clarke
> > <sdclarke@lukehouse.demon.co.uk> wrote
> >>> (ISSUE-39C) What's the difference between "related" and 
> >>> "overlapping"? Is there enough precedent to justify a new 
> property 
> >>> for "overlapping"?
> >> Three options have been discussed, namely related, overlapping and
> >> inexact. I guess I am biased by long familiarity with "related". I 
> >> feel it is sufficient to choose just one, and that it should be 
> >> "related". It seems to me that "overlapping" is a subset 
> of related, 
> >> and harder for simple people to use in a hurry. The 
> definition of the 
> >> associative relationship (RT/RT) in a thesaurus has always been 
> >> subjective, which some people see as a failing (but I see it as a 
> >> strength, so long as we recognise that the fuzziness is present).
> >
> > I agree with Stella that in the traditional thesaurus structure
> > overlapping terms have generally been treated as related terms. In 
> > BS8723-2:2005 we discussed this in paragraph 8.4.2: 
> "Preferred terms 
> > with overlapping meanings", with the example of "ships" and 
> "boats". 
> > Another example might be "students" and "pupils".
> >
> > It would be valid to define "overlapping" as a distinct type of
> > relationship, where the scopes of two concepts overlap but 
> neither is 
> > contained within the other. One specific feature of an 
> "overlapping" 
> > relationship is that both concepts must fall within the same facet, 
> > e.g. "objects" or "people" in the examples above. Related term 
> > relationships are often, though not necessarily, between 
> concepts in 
> > different facets, such as "ships RT sailors" or "pupils RT 
> teaching".
> >
> > The question is whether making this distinction is useful. In a
> > thesaurus intended for human rather than machine 
> interpretation, all 
> > that is needed is a way of saying "you have asked for A; you might 
> > also find it useful to consider using B in your search statement".
> >
> > Going further than this means moving into the role of ontologies
> > designed to allow machines to make these decisions. As I understand 
> > it, that is not the purpose of SKOS.
> >
> > Leonard
> 
> 
>

Received on Monday, 10 December 2007 15:44:20 UTC