Re: Comments on SKOS Extension for Sub. Indexing

Hi Nabonita!

Thanks for your efforts. The URL you send was wrong - it is:
http://drtc.isibang.ac.in/~guha/popsi-skos/popsi-skos_article.pdf

I'm sorry that I won't be able to participate in the International
Conference on Semantic Web & Digital Libraries (21-23, Feb. 2007)
nor the International Conference on Future of Knowledge Organization in
the Networked Environment (27-29,Auguest 2007) at your institution.
Indian knowledge organization has a long tradition and your input is
needed to finish SKOS.

You wrote:

> I've proposed some additional classes and properties as an extension
> of SKOS for subject indexing language. I welcome comments/suggestions
> from all group members and SKOS developers on this extended schema.
> 
> The extension is broadly designed for semantic document annotation
> systems. I've tried to supplement some classes and properties for
> subject indexing  in the original skos schema. I've expressed a
> concept coordination model in the extension because subject indexing
> languages emphasize on two main processes: analysis of subject
> components (facetization) and coordination (ordering) of concepts.
> The extension expresses the model of Postulate based Permuted Subject
> Indexing (POPSI) language.

Well, frankly speaking I disagree with your proposal. Ranganathan's
facets may seem fundamental but they are still artificial. They are just
*one* possible way of facet analysis. SKOS should not make them
permanent but allow *any* set of facets.

I don't know who at this mailing list is familiar to subject indexing
and the terms as you define them. As far as I understand you speak about
what I know as "syntactic indexing" (you also call it "deep structure
indexing). For those who don't understand what I am talking about please
have a look at the example (4.4 and figures 3/4) of Nabonita's paper.

The example presents a document that is

1. in the DISCIPLINE of "Medicine"
2. about the ENTITY "Human Body"
3. about a "Disease" that is a PROPERTY of the "Human Body"
4. about the ACTION of "Treatment" of the "Disease"
5. about the TYPE of "Radiation Therapy" for this "Treatment"
6. about the TOOL "Ionized Packet Chamber" for "Radiation Therapy"
7. about the ENTITY "X-Ray" in "Radiation Therapy"
8. about the APPLICATION "Radiation Technique" of "Radiation Therapy"

Well, the example could be more convincing but anyway: We don't need new
properties and classes in SKOS for that kind of indexing. You should
create a new ontology with DISCIPLINE, ENTITY, ACTION, TYPE,
APPLICATION, and METHOD and derive these properties from skos:subject
instead of trying to put them into SKOS. By the way the properties

skos:primarySubject
skos:isPrimarySubjectOf

should also be skipped (do you read this Mike? ;-) because they are not
well defined (what is "primary"? why isn't there a "secondary"? or
"third?" What about weighted index terms?

To support syntactic indexing in SKOS first the Coordination issue needs
to be solved. And I am not sure whether syntactic indexing is really an
SKOS issue. The most important is maybe *ordered sets* of index terms. I
think grouping with skos:coordination and skos:orderedCoordination is
enough but more complex realtions between index term need te be
described with additional RDF statements. See also our discussion
"Example of coordination with DDC" in August 2006 at this list.

Greetings,
Jakob

P.S: By the way you XML representation of SKOS in figure 3 is broken
(not well formed XML). You should always validate.

P.P.S: What's the state of skos:Notation and skos:Coordination?

Received on Friday, 2 February 2007 13:57:29 UTC