- From: Alistair Miles <alistair.miles@zoo.ox.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:00:40 +0000
- To: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Cc: Simon Spero <ses@unc.edu>, Leonard Will <L.Will@willpowerinfo.co.uk>, Barbara Tillett <btil@loc.gov>, "Martha M. Yee" <marthamyee@sbcglobal.net>, "Allyson Carlyle (work)" <acarlyle@u.washington.edu>, Jane Greenberg <janeg@email.unc.edu>, "public-esw-thes@w3.org" <public-esw-thes@w3.org>, public-swd-wg@w3.org
On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 09:11:07PM +0100, Dan Brickley wrote: > I'd much rather say that a SKOS "butterflies" concept is a social and > technological artifact designed to help interconnect descriptions of > butterflies, documents (and data) about butterflies, and people with > interest or expertise relating to butterflies. I'm quite consciously > avoiding saying what a "butterflies" concept in SKOS "refers to", > because theories of reference are hard to choose between. Instead, I > prefer to talk about why we bother building SKOS and what we hope can be > achieved by it. Yes, I like this pragmatic view a lot. > I don't believe a SKOS concept for "butterfly" (or "butterflies" or > "Lepidoptera") is usefully described as literally referring to "the set > of all documents about ..." those things. Nor to "the set of all users > interested in ... those things". Nor "the set of all things that are > butterflies". There are problems with taking any of those too literally. > For me, the key value in the Svenonius quote is not that it tells us > what these things refer to, but that it reminds us that we're in the > business of connecting people with information. I can live quite happily > without there being any story about what some SKOS concept refers > directly to, so long as we emphasise its various named associations with > documents and their topics; with user interests, needs and expertise, > and also (hello, OWL...) with more formal descriptions of the world. Very nicely put. Cheers, Alistair -- 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 Thursday, 19 February 2009 11:01:43 UTC