SKOS transitive hierarchical relations

Hello,

Based on the discussions on this mailing list and the SKOS 
reference/model documentation, my understanding of the broader/narrower 
properties is that it is up to the application (processing a SKOS 
vocabulary) to interpret the hierarchical properties skos:broader and 
skos:narrower as transitive or not. Thus I can understand why "By 
convention, skos:broaderTransitive is not used to make assertions" (from 
the SKOS ontology).
However, there are vocabularies published on the Web that relate their 
concepts using only skos:broaderTransitive (and not skos:broader). 
Although these are valid statements, I wonder if, for interoperability 
reasons, these vocabularies should additionally include skos:broader 
relations alongside with the already contained skos:broaderTransitive 
relations.
This way, e.g., SPARQL queries involving SKOS vocabularies of different 
origin, might return a more complete result set if relying on the 
convention mentioned above and only query for skos:broader.
Would it be, in your opinion, a useful feature for a thesaurus 
management software to detect concepts that are only related by 
skos:broaderTransitive and notify the user whether to automatically add 
the skos:broader relation?

best,
Christian

-- 
Research Group Multimedia Information Systems
Faculty of Computer Science
University of Vienna

Received on Wednesday, 4 January 2012 10:39:28 UTC