Re: Relationships involving collections

On Tue, 5 Feb 2008 at 11:57:19, Alasdair Gray <agray@dcs.gla.ac.uk> 
wrote
>Hi Leonard,
>
>Perhaps it is my lack of knowledge in forming/modelling vocabularies, 
>but I am now very confused as to what the purpose of a collection 
>(called an array in [3]). Would it be fair to say that they should be 
>used with extreme caution and rarely? Are there definite use cases 
>where they should and should not be used? I'm getting the impression 
>that they are not used to further clarify the hierarchy.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Alasdair
>
>[3] http://www.willpowerinfo.co.uk/glossary.htm

Alasdair

I cannot say anything authoritative about how the SKOS people use the 
term "collections" - perhaps one of them will clarify, if it is not 
already covered in their documentation. If their concept of "collection" 
is different from the thesaurus concept of "array", it would be helpful 
to see this stated.

"Arrays", as defined in the glossary you refer to above, occur very 
frequently in a thesaurus - every group of sibling terms is an array; it 
may or may not have a node label showing how it is organised, and a 
whole list of sibling terms may be grouped under more than one node 
label, reflecting different characteristics of division. There is no 
reason to use arrays with caution or rarely - they are inherent in the 
thesaurus structure.

You may find it useful to look at the UML structure diagram for a 
thesaurus developed for the standard BS8723, at

http://schemas.bs8723.org/2008-01-08/BS8723-5/Model/Model.jpg

The need to show arrays explicitly in this model, rather than just 
leaving them implicit as a name for a set of sibling terms, is

1. So that they can be given node labels
2. So that their members (concepts and other arrays) can be ordered in a 
sequence other than random or alphabetical by default.

Leonard




-- 
Willpower Information       (Partners: Dr Leonard D Will, Sheena E Will)
Information Management Consultants              Tel: +44 (0)20 8372 0092
27 Calshot Way, Enfield, Middlesex EN2 7BQ, UK. Fax: +44 (0)870 051 7276
L.Will@Willpowerinfo.co.uk               Sheena.Will@Willpowerinfo.co.uk
---------------- <URL:http://www.willpowerinfo.co.uk/> -----------------

Received on Tuesday, 5 February 2008 12:22:11 UTC