Re: how to represent different kind of associative relationships with SKOS?

2009/12/14 José Ramón Pérez Agüera <jose.aguera@gmail.com>

> Hi all,
> I have a thesaurus that I want export to SKOS format. However, this
> thesaurus defines following relationships between concepts: [see below]
>
> My first idea was to map all these relationships with skos:related, however
> my thesaurus is a geographical thesaurus, therefore relationships like
> capital of are important.
>
> My question is: Is SKOS Core expressive enough to represent these relations
> in some way or I should use OWL to represent this thesaurus like an
> Ontology?
>

Hi José,

There are a lot of issues that may nudge you one way or the other, but if
you're looking to use the thesaurus as a Knowledge Organizing System, rather
than a Knowledge Representation System, SKOS can be extended to represent
these relations in a way that will be backwards compatible with SKOS Core.
The downside is that you may have to do a lot of contorting if you want to
express more sophisticated constraints (e.g. a Country must have a capital;
the capital must be a city; the city must be contained within the country,
etc). [I am punning between Subject and Object for simplicity].

Most of the properties are associative, and would thus be sub-properties of
skos:related.  Sub-properties of skos:related do not have to be symmetric
themselves, so you can use inverted properties to represent this so that a
reasoner can infer the appropriate inverse link.

There is one relationship in the list that may be hierarchical rather than
associative; if it's a specialization of the partitive relationship
(BTP/NTP), then you can define it as a sub-property of broaderPartitive or
broader. Otherwise, you can just treat it as associative.

Simon

*Symmetric Relationships*

* related to*

ObjectProperty: relatedTo
    Characteristics:
        Symmetric
    SubPropertyOf:
        related

*ally of*

ObjectProperty: allyOf
    Characteristics:
        Symmetric
    SubPropertyOf:
        related

* historical connection *

ObjectProperty: historicalConnection
    Characteristics:
        Symmetric
    SubPropertyOf:
        related

* distinguished from    *

ObjectProperty: distinguishedFrom
    Characteristics:
        Symmetric
    SubPropertyOf:
        related

* adjacent to    *

ObjectProperty: adjacentTo
    Characteristics:
        Symmetric
    SubPropertyOf:
        related

* coextensive with  *

ObjectProperty: coextensiveWith
    Characteristics:
        Symmetric
    SubPropertyOf:
        related

* possibly identified as *

 ObjectProperty: possiblyIdentifiedAs
    Characteristics:
        Symmetric
    SubPropertyOf:
        related

*Asymmetric Relationships

**capital of
capital is     *

ObjectProperty: capitalOf
    InverseOf:
        capitalIs
    SubPropertyOf:
        related

 ObjectProperty: capitalIs
    InverseOf:
        capitalOf
    SubPropertyOf:
        related

* moved from
moved to    *

ObjectProperty: movedFrom
    InverseOf:
        movedTo
    SubPropertyOf:
        related

 ObjectProperty: movedTo
    InverseOf:
        movedFrom
    SubPropertyOf:
        related


* successor of
predecessor of  *

ObjectProperty: successorOf
    InverseOf:
        predecessorOf
    SubPropertyOf:
        related

 ObjectProperty: predecessorOf
    InverseOf:
        successorOf
    SubPropertyOf:
        related

*member of
member is       *

ObjectProperty: memberOf
    InverseOf:
        memberIs
    SubPropertyOf:
        related

 ObjectProperty: memberIs
    InverseOf:
        memberOf
    SubPropertyOf:
        related