Re: Ordering concepts in a Tree display

Hi Jon,

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 03:16:30PM -0500, Jon Phipps wrote:
> 
> 
> Alistair Miles wrote:
> >(2) represent your systematic display using some other data format (some
> >sort of XML would be ideal, as you get hierarchy and ordering easily), in
> >which case you'd have to figure out how to manage your systematic display
> >data in addition to your basic broader/narrower graph and make sure the two
> >weren't inconsistent,
> 
> Hi Alistair,
> 
> This is the approach we're taking in our upcoming refresh of the
> Registry, since we believe that in general ordering for display is a
> 'local' system issue rather than an expression of conceptual
> semantics and is liable to be highly variable. Not to mention that
> ordering for human browsing is usually completely unrelated to
> semantics.
> 
> We're using JSON to express a 'manifest' that can be easily
> displayed as an ordered hierarchy, the ordering of branches and
> leaves performed and stored independent of the maintenance of the
> RDF.

I don't have a lot of hands-dirty experience with data here, but my feeling is
this is a reasonable approach. Thinking purely practically as a programmer,
I suspect that, as you start to explore more and more tree display cases,
you'd find it's quite difficult to come up with a completely general set of
SKOS extensions/add-ons that would allow you to layer the required display
information as more RDF statements on top of the existing SKOS RDF data -
although I think it would be worth enumerating some test cases and evaluating
some RDF representations because this is just a hunch.

Some sort of companion representation for the tree display data as XML or
JSON sounds like a good idea, for now at least.

Good to hear from you, great to hear you're back working on the metadata
registry.

Cheers,

Alistair


> 
> Nice to have you around,
> 
> Jon Phipps
> http://metadataregistry.org
> 

-- 
Alistair Miles
Head of Epidemiological Informatics
Centre for Genomics and Global Health <http://cggh.org>
The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics
Roosevelt Drive
Oxford
OX3 7BN
United Kingdom
Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
Email: alimanfoo@gmail.com
Tel: +44 (0)1865 287669

Received on Tuesday, 1 February 2011 16:24:14 UTC