Re: ISSUE 77 and postcoordination [and ISSUE-40!]

Hi Jakob, Aida,

Just a few words

>>
>> I would not agree here, although I don't understand what do you mean 
>> by 'practical meaning'. My view is that KOS itself establishes the 
>> meaning of a concept within the system. Hence SKOS or any other 
>> carrier of KOS is not likely to strip KOS of the meaning that can be 
>> implied from relationships between concepts in the scheme. Concept in 
>> KOS has meaning whether this is attached to a resource or not.
>
> A KOS encoded in SKOS, written in a book or drafted on a whiteboard is 
> nothing but a stream of bits and bytes, a pile of paper and letters, 
> an aggregation of atoms. It's the usage that creates meaning.

I don't see a real opposition here: (1) concept in a KOS alone can have 
a meaning that makes them accessible, just by their linguistic 
information and semantic positioning in a network. (2) Meaning can also 
be given by their being used to describe documents. Or to borrow from 
nice semantic theories, I don't see why having extensional meaning would 
prohibit intensional one :-p
[notice: afaik, the latter aspect can be quite important, even in 
"traditional" KOS world (isn't it related to literary warrant?) Or I 
hope so, because in my project we do concept mapping based on the books 
these concepts are indexed with ;-) ]

Anyway, I don't think it is SKOS to decide here if one way is wrong, by 
deciding not to enable one or the other. Of course SKOS focuses on 
allowing 1, but that's because this is not done elsewhere on the SW.  
The question for 2 is more about whether we should offer a specific 
property for linking concept to resources (skos:subject) or instead rely 
on other vocabularies that already enable this (dc:subject).

>
> I raised ISSUE 77 and 40 because I stumbled upon two application 
> scenarios that's I'd like to encode with SKOS:
>
> 1. Indexing: How do you encode the statement "Person <P> indexed 
> resource <R> with concepts <C1> and <C2>"?
>
> 2. Mapping: How do you encode the statement "Concept <A> in vocabulary 
> <X> has the same meaning as Concept <B> and <C> together (coordinated) 
> in vocabulary <Y>"?
>
> The current SKOS draft does not answer this questions, but maybe it is 
> not intended to do so.

For coordination it is still to be decided - your input is of course important in that respect. For the first aspect of your 1, I'd say we 
won't go in that direction, but rely on generic RDF/SPARQL 
contextualization mechanisms. Though imperfect, these are already there.

Best,

Antoine

Received on Monday, 17 March 2008 22:04:10 UTC