Re: skos:Concept and "real world things"

Hi François-Paul

Similar issues are discussed large on sw forum in the thread called 
"Managing Co-reference (Was: A Semantic Elephant?)"
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008May/0078.html
I just answered at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008May/0103.html
... and seems to me your question has something to do with this s-property

Bernard

François-Paul Servant a écrit :
>
> Hi,
>
> In the "Linked Data" community, people give URIs to "real world 
> things", such as animals, cities or persons.
>
> In SKOS, we define and give URIs to concepts, "ideas or meanings that 
> are unit of thoughts..."
>
> It seems obvious that there is a deep (and possibly complex relation) 
> between skos:Concept(s) and "real world (physical) things" (I would 
> even say that, except maybe in very particular domains such as 
> mathematics, there is no way to define a concept without relating it 
> to "real world things").
>
> For instance, there is a relation between the skos:Concept 
> "ex:platypus" declared in a given SKOS scheme and the funny australian 
> animal which was given the URI "dbPedia:Platypus" by the dbPedia project:
>
> skosex:platypus p dbPedia:Platypus
>
> What kind of property  should be used for "p" in that statement?
>
> We can think of:
> 1) owl:sameAs
> 2) skos:exactMatch
> 3) moat:meaningURI
> 4) dc:subject
> 5) ...
>
> 1) doesn't seem OK (for reasons that include the reasons why we do not 
> use owl:sameAs to state that 2 skos:Concepts are the same)
>
> 2) implies that dbPedia:Platypus is a skos:Concept. DBPedia doesn't 
> state that, and it is controversial to say that a real world thing is 
> a conceptual resource. SKOS doesn't seem to want to allow such 
> statements: in the wiki [1] we can read:
> "So, for a resource of type skos:Concept, any properties of that 
> resource (such as creator, date of modification, source etc.) should 
> be interpreted as properties of a concept, and not as properties of 
> some 'real world thing' that that resource may be a conceptualisation 
> of."
>
> 3) MOAT ("Meaning Of A Tag" [2]) relates tags to their meaning. The 
> meaning of a tag is an instance of a class "Meaning" (that probably 
> could be considered as a skos:Concept). A dedicated property 
> moat:meaningURI is used to link the "Meaning" to a "real world thing". 
> We have something like this:
>
> tag:platypus moat:hasMeaning moat:meaning_platypus
> moat:meaning_platypus moat:meaningURI dbPedia:Platypus
>
> 4) seems weak
>
> 5) any better idea ?
>
> The pattern used in [3] (MOAT) seems OK to me: we have on one side the 
> "Concept", and on the other the "real world thing". This allows to 
> write statements about the two entities, which are indeed distinct, 
> and at the same time allows to clearly define a concept, when existing 
> URI of a real world thing already exists.
> However, I would'nt feel bad with solution 2 (I am ready to consider 
> real world things as concepts). But of course, my preference is 5 ;-)
>
> Anyway, shouldn't SKOS define a property allowing to state the 
> relation between a skos:Concept and the real world thing that that 
> skos:Concept is the conceptualisation of?
>
> Best Regards,
>
> François-Paul Servant
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/SkosDesign/ConceptSemantics
> [2] http://moat-project.org/
>
>
>
>
>

-- 

*Bernard Vatant
*Knowledge Engineering
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Received on Thursday, 15 May 2008 12:46:40 UTC