[SKOS] ISSUE-44 (was: Suggestion for SKOS FAQ)

Hi all,

The current SKOS Reference Working Draft [1] takes the following position.

The property skos:broader is, by convention, used to assert a "direct"
hierarchical link between two concepts. 

The property skos:broaderTransitive is used to infer the transitive closure
of hierarchical links, i.e. all "direct" and "indirect" hierarchical links
between concepts.

A software application can use skos:broader to query for direct hierarchical
links, and can use skos:broaderTransitive to query for all (direct and
indirect) hierarchical links.

This is a pragmatic position, supporting software applications that need to
access both direct and indirect hierarchical links. 

Note that many thesaurus software applications have this need, regardless of
your philosophical position on whether the thesaurus hierarchical
relationship is transitive or not.

Cheers,

Alistair.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-skos-reference-20080125/

--
Alistair Miles
Senior Computing Officer
Image Bioinformatics Research Group
Department of Zoology
The Tinbergen Building
University of Oxford
South Parks Road
Oxford
OX1 3PS
United Kingdom
Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
Email: alistair.miles@zoo.ox.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1865 281993

Received on Wednesday, 14 May 2008 16:35:10 UTC