Re: [Dbpedia-discussion] Using DBpedia resources as skos:Concepts?

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Leonard Will <L.Will@willpowerinfo.co.uk>wrote:

>
> As you can certainly think about grains or sand, the fall of Carthage, or
> Mrs Obama, these fall within our definition of "concept". Perhaps some other
> word could be found to express this better and avoid confusion with a
> narrower definition such as "abstract concept", but the word "concept" is
> widely used in the thesaurus literature, in order to make a distinction
> between the thing that is thought about and the words that may be used to
> label it.
>
> My view of this is from the approach of the library / thesaurus / knowledge
> organisation community and the ISO thesaurus standard working party, and I
> cannot say definitively that the SKOS interpretation is the same - there
> have been some erudite discussions here about the difference between a thing
> and our thoughts about the thing, but from a practical point of view of
> applying indexing terms to resources these seem unnecessary.


Obligatory unicorn: http://www.ibiblio.org/fred2.0/wordpress/?p=30

The SKOS working group explicitly rejected the  interpretation that a
skos:Concept is something that a Document is about, but declined to provide
an explicit alternative.

There are practical implications for indexing that follow from this
decision.  For example, the SKOS broader relationship is not transitive;
this is hard to understand with a document based domain of interpretation.
Without transitive BT relationships, standard indexing behaviors like upward
posting, or assigning the most specific headings to a document are no longer
possible  (or rather, give different results).

Once one starts thinking extensionally this whole discussion becomes much
easier ("Word and Subject?").

For example:

Everything that is-about something is a document.
Everything that something is-about is a concept.

Every generic-concept is a concept.
Every named-individual-concept is a concept.

Every concept that has-associated-class K is a generic-concept.
Every concept that has-associated-individual I is a
named-individual-concept.

If A has-broader-term-generic B then A has-broader-term B.
If A has-broader-term-instantive B then A has-broader-term B.

If A has-broader-term-generic B then A is a generic-concept.
If A has-broader-term-generic B then B is a generic-concept.

If A has-broader-term-instantive B then A is a named-individual-concept.
If A has-broader-term-instantive B then B is a generic-concept.

If A has-broader-term-generic B and
   A has-associated-class X and
   B has-associated-class Y
 then X subclassOfs Y.

If A has-broader-term-instantive B and
   A has-associated-individual X and
   B has-associated-class Y
 then X types Y.

If a concept A has-broader-term B and
   B has-broader-term C
 then A has-broader-term C.

If a concept A has-broader-term-generic B and
   B has-broader-term-generic C
then A has-broader-term-generic C.

If a concept A has-broader-term-instantive B and
   B has-broader-term-generic C
 then A has-broader-term-instantive C.

Simon