Re: SKOS Consistency

Hi Quentin,

It's perfectly legitimate for a concept scheme not to have top concepts. In fact we can expect quite many of them will be in that situation, and not the least important ones, e.g. LCSH [1].

Note that this is also related to the fact that in many cases, KOSs are not completely structured, which would lead to a vast amount of top concepts if these were defined algorithmically (by selecting the concepts without parents). I've computed it for LCSH long time ago, and found dozens of thousands "orphan concepts"--out of my head I'd say 60K, but have to admit my memories are not really good, I guess some here have done it as well but have fresher memories. Of course this would make such skos:hasTopConcept statements not very informative for giving entry points in a thesaurus' structure.

By the way I have updated [2] to point to the interesting PoolParty validation service, in case you're interested!

Cheers,

Antoine

[1] http://id.loc.gov
[1] http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/validation


> Hi all,
>
> I was looking at the SKOS reference [1] and I was unable to determine
> whether a SKOS model would be consistent if no skos:hasTopConcept
> property was defined within a concept scheme.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Quentin
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference
>
> --
> Quentin Reul
>
> Semantic Technology Consultant
> TenForce BVBA
> Haachtsesteenweg 378
> 1910 Kampenhout
> Belgium

Received on Tuesday, 6 July 2010 14:23:11 UTC