SKOS comment: Grouping Concept Schemes

Hi,

Grouping Concept Schemes via making skos:ConceptScheme a subclass of 
skos:Collection does imply or allow some more changes that you may be 
interested in: We could rename skos:inScheme to skos:memberIn and make 
it the reverse to skos:member? What's the semantic difference between

<C> skos:inScheme <S>

and

<S> skos:member <C>

In practise I think it's the same, so why not combining it? I think it 
makes SKOS simpler to put this things (skos:ConceptScheme and 
skos:Collection, skos:inScheme and skos:member) together.


Alistair Miles wrote:

> We ask at this stage feedback and reviews on this draft specification.
> All comments are welcome and may be sent to public-swd-wg@w3.org;
> please include the text "SKOS comment" in the subject line. Note
> especially that there are a number of open issues, which are indicated
> in the document.

As explained in http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3908 there is a need to 
hierarchically group Concept Schemes (a Concept Scheme may contain other 
Concept Schemes). To solve this, change the current draft in the 
following way:

Make skos:ConceptScheme a subclass of skos:Collection. The draft says:

In 4.1. "A SKOS concept scheme can be viewed as an aggregation of one or 
more conceptual resources. "

In 9.1. "SKOS concept collections are labeled and/or ordered groups of 
conceptual resources."

An "aggregation of one or more conceptual resources" is obviously a 
special kind of a "labeled and/or ordered groups of conceptual 
resources". By making skos:ConceptScheme a subclass of skos:Collection 
you can group concept schemes this way:

<A> rdf:type skos:ConceptScheme .
<B> rdf:type skos:ConceptScheme .

<A> skos:member <B> .

You have to change S40 in 9.4. Integrity Conditions to
"skos:Collection is disjoint with skos:Concept and skos:LabelRelation."


You could also think about making skos:hasTopConcept a sub-property of 
skos:member, thus

<MyScheme> skos:hasTopConcept <MyConcept>

implies

<MyScheme> skos:member <MyConcept>

But I am not sure whether a top concept must also be a member of its 
concept scheme. Same aplies to skos:inScheme: You could specify

<MyConcept> skos:inScheme <MyScheme>

implies

<MyScheme> skos:member <MyConcept>

Maybe you better rename 'skos:inScheme' to 'skos:memberIn'?


I have not found any other problems with this solution so far.

The solution should also be noted in
10.6.6. Links Between and Within Concept Schemes


Greetings,
Jakob

-- 
Jakob Voß <jakob.voss@gbv.de>, skype: nichtich
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de

Received on Thursday, 31 January 2008 10:42:29 UTC