New use case ISO 3166 and its issues

Hello,

Last year I gave a talk about "Encoding changing country codes for the
Semantic Web with ISO 3166 and SKOS" at the 2nd International Conference
on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR 2007). I finally the finished
the revised paper which is accessible at http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3908
[cs.IR]
It deals about encoding ISO 3166 country codes with SKOS and raises 
some problems of the current specification. In short these are:


NOTATIONS (ISSUE-79): Notations are artificial codes used in some
thesauri and classification schemes. Skos should define a way how to
deal with notations. You need either a property or something in the
language code.

Last year I proposed to use the 'zxx' language code but with RFC 4646 we
could use a better way. If the skos specification defines to use the
private language subtag 'x-notation' for notations, you could encode
things like:

iso3166:FR a skos:Concept ;
  skos:prefLabel "France"@en ;
  skos:prefLabel "FR@x-notation-twoletter" ;
  skos:prefLabel "FRA@x-notation-threeletter" ;
  skos:prefLabel "250@x-notation-numerical" .

I don't know if this is a final solution for notations, but in any way
there 
must be an explicit recommendation how to deal with notations in skos.


GROUPING OF CONCEPT SCHEMES (ISSUE-??): ISO 3166 consists of different
parts that build opon another. ISSUE-33 solved encoding of concept
hierarchies with skos:Collection and skos:member - but what about
nesting Concept Schemes? Several schemes contain parts that can also
be used independently. The best solution I could found so far is to make
skos:ConceptScheme a subclass of skos:Collection so you can say:

iso3166-1: a skos:ConceptScheme .
iso3166-2: a skos:ConceptScheme .

iso3166: a skos:ConceptScheme ;
  skos:member iso3166-1: ;
  skos:member iso3166-2: .


CHANGES AND VERSIONING (ISSUE-??): Knowledge organization schemes change
over time. You can track changes via versioning. Different versions can
be connected with the skos mapping vocabulary. I gave an example of
changing and versioning with skos:exactMatch, skos:narrowMatch,
skos:broadMatch, and owl:sameAs (!). I found no problem so far, but
maybe I missed something. In general you should stress more the
importance to assign new URIs for concept that have changed. Management
of changes belongs to any good knowledge organization system, but I am
aware that there are many KOS that live without changes. The final SKOS
recommendation should at least mention it.


Greetings,
Jakob


-- 
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG)
Digitale Bibliothek - Jakob Voß
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1
37073 Goettingen - Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242
http://www.gbv.de
jakob.voss@gbv.de

Received on Monday, 28 January 2008 23:30:38 UTC