Re: RE : [ISSUE-77] [ISSUE-48] Re: [Dbpedia-discussion] Skos subject properties are deprecated

Bernard,

 > Not sure SKOS should make this distinction, and I'm not sure I make it
 > clearly myself. What is the point of organizing concepts, if not for
 > organizing resources? I would even say, pardon me it's Friday evening,
 > what is the point of defining a concept at all, if not for cataloguing
 > things?

It is not normal practice that vocabularies 'declare' which of millions 
of resources in the world are indexed by them. It is rather the 
opposite... resource metadata declare according
to which vocabulary standard i.e. concept (URI) the subject of the 
resource should be understood.

Theoretically - if vocabulary exposed in SKOS is in some kind of
registry we may have millions of resources from various
collections/countries/ pointing to particular concept URI from this
vocabulary. Which is why it makes sense that metadata of the resource
should point to the SKOS concept - but SKOS need not point to metadata
or resource.

I thought that SKOS may be used to organize/expose concepts and not
resources themselves. For all kind of vocabulary management reasons and
good practice in collection management it makes more sense to have a
vocabulary expressed in SKOS kept externally from metadata and also to
keep metadata externally from resources.

If one using Dublin Core wishes to nest SKOS description or embed all
these in resource or keep them bundled together in the same repository -
that is understandable, but this scenario would not be typical for
vocabularies that function as de facto standards or are shared.

I think what Leonard (and I) are maybe thinking here of the usual 
practice in managing metadata using relational databases and keeping 
things that needs to be managed/updated, controlled and accessed 
separatelly as separate. I don't know enough about semantic technologies 
to be able to see how this is no not relevant.

rgds

Aida

Received on Monday, 28 January 2008 02:36:21 UTC