Re: SKOS Reference Editor's Draft 23 December 2007

Hi Alistair,

I have finally had time to catch up with this. I generally like the 
revised document and find it very clear. In particular I find the 
inclusion of the mapping relations a great bonus. However, I have a few 
issues that I would like to raise which I have not seen on the mailing 
list so far.

I notice that the domain and range of both intra- and inter-vocabulary 
relationships are still only concepts. In my work with astronomy 
vocabularies I have found the need to express such relationships between 
collections of concepts. Is there a specific reason for only allowing 
concepts, or is it something that could be generalised to the union of 
concepts and collections?

In section 7 (where intra-vocabulary relationships are introduced) the 
discussion makes it clear that query expansion techniques of following 
multiple broader term links are expected to be the normal usage. 
However, I found that the discussion in section 10 (where 
inter-vocabulary relationships are introduced) that the discussion was 
more negative about applying query expansion techniques here. Could the 
discussion in section 10 be aligned with the tone of the discussion of 
section 7 as this is one of the things that we are exploring with the 
astronomy vocabularies.

Finally, I notice that there are no mechanisms for combining concepts. 
Previously there were "and", "or", and "not" operators in the mapping 
specification. I seem to remember that there was talk of introducing 
"union", "intersection", and presumably "set minus" into the skos 
specification. Is this going to happen? The astronomers I am working 
with think that these kind of operations are important.

Thanks for all the hard work,

Alasdair

Miles, AJ (Alistair) wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Just before Christmas, Sean and I published a first Editors' Draft of the SKOS Reference:
>
> http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/SKOS/reference/20071223
>
> The SKOS Reference is the technical specification that will be at the heart of the SKOS W3C Recommendation.
>
> This document is just an Editors' Draft -- it is *not* a W3C Public Working Draft. It is currently under review within the Semantic Web Deployment WG, and we hope to make a decision to publish a first W3C Public Working Draft within the next couple of weeks. Discussions about the review and the publication decision will be going on on the public-swd-wg@w3.org list, some of which may not be cced to this list, so you might want to keep an eye on that (Web archive: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/).
>
> There will, of course, be plenty of opportunity to comment at the Public Working Draft stage. However, comments and suggestions at this early stage are, as always, very welcome. If you feel there are issues with the technical content, please say so. If you think any of the prose is confusing, ambiguous, or there is anything important missing, please say so (and do feel free to suggest some prose if you feel inspired :)
>
> As I also said to my SWD colleagues, I'm very conscious that this document is less than perfect, and I think there is a lot of work still to do, but hopefully this first editor's draft will at least help to focus our discussions. 
>
> I'm also conscious that the document is a bit "behind" the current discussions on this list. I hope to catch up with this asap, and build the great ideas and points of view expressed here into subsequent editions of the SKOS Reference. If there is any idea or point of view that appears to have been missed or not understood, please do not hesitate to draw attention to it. 
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Alistair.
>
> --
> Alistair Miles
> Research Associate
> Science and Technology Facilities Council
> Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
> Harwell Science and Innovation Campus
> Didcot
> Oxfordshire OX11 0QX
> United Kingdom
> Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
> Email: a.j.miles@rl.ac.uk
> Tel: +44 (0)1235 445440 
>
>   

-- 
Dr Alasdair J G Gray
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~agray/

Explicator project 
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Received on Tuesday, 22 January 2008 15:32:49 UTC