Re: [SKOS]: [ISSUE 44] BroaderNarrowerSemantics

Hi everyone,

Can I chime in with a brief practical example?  I'm currently doing some 
work with Keyword AAA (a thesaurus commonly used in the Government of 
Australia) and chose to use SKOS because it was simple and value-neutral.

To date, my experience using SKOS has been very positive -- the loose 
semantic rules around SKOS make it very quick and easy to do useful work 
with it.

In particular, the simplicity of the syntax makes it a viable 
translation target (I'm translating the XML export format from Tower 
Software's TRIM package into SKOS).

As such, I am 100% in favour of trimming SKOS Core to the absolute 
minimum required (i.e. no transitivity).

One final aside:  Perhaps the issue of properties like 
"skos:broaderTransitive" could be mitigated by creating an 'optional' 
set of extra properties, much like Dublin Core vs DCMI Terms?

Regards,

-- Stephen.

Antoine Isaac wrote:
> - keep [SKOS] basic, and present a model that allow to represent the 
> fundamental features recurring in these approaches, even if to represent 
> them on a quite superficial level (with limited semantic definitions);
> ...
> I would follow the first option, and would like to emphasize (and 
> propose to discussion) the two following reasons for it:
> 1. SKOS is for the semantic web, and it should therefore present simple, 
> and, importantly, pragmatic approach for KOS representation. Perhaps 
> some people around here will find it debatable, but I think SKOS should 
> for instance accomodate the representation of Wikipedia categories [3] 
> in SKOS, without having to spend years on re-structuring the complete 
> thing.
> 2. SKOS shall not enter in a competition with all kind of initiatives 
> that are currently running, and whose aim is to carefully define and 
> give guidelines for the design of precise KOS categories, e.g. BS 8723. 
> SKOS has to be compatible with the models these initiative build, this 
> does not mean that it has to represent all what the corresponding models 
> are up to.
> ...
> It might be frustrating (and most of the time it is for me), because it 
> results in an ontology that is more lightweight than what was thought of 
> initially. But I think we cannot really avoid that, that's an inherent 
> part of this "let's design a semantic web standard" game.

Received on Monday, 14 January 2008 14:18:26 UTC