Re: Using SKOS for representing Drupal taxonomy vocabularies and terms

Dear Stephane,

The proposed change (i.e., using skos:ConceptScheme and skos:inScheme instead of skos:Collection and skos:member) is certainly the way to go!  SKOS collections are rather for groupings of concepts *within* a vocabulary.

About the rest: you might hear sometime that "terms" are not in a perfect match with SKOS' "concepts". But from what I understand from your use case [3], your mapping seems perfectly valid. In fact the case is very close to some of the use cases SKOS has had [4].

Also, there has been some use of Dublin Core properties to described SKOS concept schemes [5], maybe you want to re-use them for your "vocabulary" node at [1]. You can also use some SKOS documentation properties there as well, such as skos:definition or skos:scopeNote. But feel free to follow your own intuition, as we never came close to any formal recommendation on that matter.

In the same spirit, you might see that we hinted at using Dublin Core's dcterms:subject for using concepts as subject of documents (i.e., the link between "node" and "term" at [1]). But as sioc:topic is a subproperty of dcterms:subject, everything is perfect.

By the way, I guess everyone on this SKOS mailing list is glad to see SKOS uptake in the Drupal community. Keep up the excellent work! And don't hesitate to post other questions here, if you have any.

Cheers,  

Antoine

[1] http://openspring.net/blog/2010/01/12/rdfa-in-drupal-7-last-call-for-feedback-before-alpha-release
[2] http://groups.drupal.org/node/44094#comment-154828
[3] http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/taxonomy
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-ucr
[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/#secscheme


> Hi,
>
> As you might already know, Drupal 7 will expose its data as RDFa and
> we've tried to represent Drupal's internal structure in RDF. The current
> status of the schema is depicted in the graph at [1]. We received a
> comment at [2] recommending to use skos:ConceptScheme instead of
> skos:Collection for vocabularies. This seems a fair point, and I would
> like to get some feedback from the SKOS community before I make this
> change, as there might other things we've missed. The main concepts we
> have in Drupal are taxonomy vocabularies and terms. Each term belong to
> one vocabulary. So far we've mapped 'term' to skos:Concept, and I think
> that's fine. We've mapped 'vocabulary' to skos:Collection but the
> suggested change is to use skos:ConceptScheme instead, which would also
> imply to use skos:inScheme between each term and the vocabulary it
> belongs to. Below are some examples using a vocabulary for 'countries'
> and a term for 'Italy'.
>
> With the current RDF representation:
>
> site:vocabularyCountries a skos:Collection .
>      skos:member site:termItaly.
> site:termItaly a skos:Concept .
>
>
> With the proposed change:
>
> site:vocabularyCountries a skos:ConceptScheme .
> site:termItaly a skos:Concept ;
>      skos:inScheme site:vocabularyCountries .
>
>
> And with all the other metadata for vocabulary and term:
>
> site:vocabularyCountries a skos:ConceptScheme ;
>      rdfs:label "Countries" ;
>      rdfs:comment "A vocabulary containing countries on a Drupal site" .
> site:termItaly a skos:Concept ;
>      skos:prefLabel "Italy" ;
>      skos:definition "A term for Italy in a Drupal site" ;
>      skos:inScheme site:vocabularyCountries .
>
>
> I would appreciate any feedback on whether this is the best way of using
> SKOS in the context of Drupal taxonomies [3].
>
> all the best,
> Steph.
>
> [1]
> http://openspring.net/blog/2010/01/12/rdfa-in-drupal-7-last-call-for-feedback-before-alpha-release
> [2] http://groups.drupal.org/node/44094#comment-154828
> [3] http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/taxonomy

Received on Sunday, 21 March 2010 16:46:15 UTC