Re: [SKOS] The return of ISSUE-44 (was Re: TR : SKOS Reference Editor's Draft 23 December 2007)

On Jan 10, 2008, at 10:07 AM, Bernard Vatant wrote:

> taxonomy like in the example of Simon, that's OK. If you don't care  
> about it, because the concepts are much more fuzzy, that's also OK.  
> I agree with Dan that there is nothing wrong with being wrong, if  
> you know that you are wrong - as Confucius asserted some time  
> ago  :-) [...
> "Shall I teach you about knowledge? What you know, you know, what  
> you don't know, you don't know. This is true wisdom." ]


"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There  
are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we  
don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we  
don't know we don't know." - Donald Rumsfeld, Neo-Confucian

> So let SKOS be strongly agnostic about knowledge representation, in  
> order to be as clear as possible on the use of SKOS vs OWL, for  
> example.


This is a worthwhile goal, but if that is the case it is better not   
to use the labels "broader" et. al. from the domain of thesauri to  
describe relationships with a  different semantics.   In the CILIP's  
introductory text on thesaurus construction,  Broughton (2006,pp.  
120-128) takes great pains to make it clear that hierarchical  
relationships must be universal to be correct.  Of course, I fell  
asleep due to the Venn diagrams[1]

At the very least, there need to be very, very explicit warnings that  
these labels are being used to denote a different relationship to the  
identically named thesaural relationships.

Simon

[1]  Who was Venn and his diagrams? Was he the most boring child ever?  
(upper middle class accent) "Father, I have my foot in your bedroom  
and also in the hallway. As you can see from my diagram I am not only  
in the bedroom, I am also in the hallway." "Venn, fuck of out of this  
house!" "All right, father. But I am outside of the house but my hand  
is in the window and my foot is in a grapefruit. As you can see from  
my diagram… (mime of patricide) Father, me and Socrates…both died." --  
Eddie Izzard, Circle (http://www.auntiemomo.com/cakeordeath/circletranscript.html 
)

Received on Thursday, 10 January 2008 13:12:35 UTC