Re: general type of controlled vocabulary

Bob Mulrenin wrote:

> We are planning some open source components and there are a couple of
> general issues and I would appreciate your feedback.
> 
> What is the best practice for declaring the type of controlled
> vocabulary  as either either thesaurus, taxonomy, classification scheme,
> subject headings,  folksonomy, etc ?  Hopefully referencing a standard
> vocabulary of these types (?)
> 
> It would help to be consistent with others and so that the tools  can
> adapt the management and presentation features, as well as offer
> services to external apps....
> 
> <skos:ConceptScheme rdf:about="http://www.ukat.org.uk/thesaurus">
> <dc:type>http://..../thesaurus</dc:type>

As Stella pointed out it's not that easy to tell what is a thesaurus,
taxonomy, classification scheme etc. I think it's more relevant what
specific features of a controlled vocabulary you want. I am working on a
general typology of knowledge organization systems based on properties
and features rather instead of types [1] but this is probably still too
vague and informal. With SKOS we should define a set of semantic,
formally defined features. Alistair started with the obvious condition
that should apply for all concept schemes [2].

An additional features of a concept schemes could be that hierarchic
relations do form a tree - then it's a kind of taxonomy or
classification scheme and you can use other presentations than in a
multi-hierarchical concept scheme.

What kind of open source components do you plan?

Greetings,
Jakob


[1] Jakob Voss (2007): Tagging, Folksonomy & Co - Renaissance of Manual
Indexing? http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0701072

[2] SKOS as a semantic extension of RDFS.
http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/SkosDesign/RdfsSemanticExtension

-- 
Jakob Voß <jakob.voss@gbv.de>, skype: nichtich
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de

Received on Wednesday, 28 February 2007 16:11:28 UTC