Re: SKOS transitive hierarchical relations

Dear Dominique,

>
> Le 4 janv. 2012 à 15:26, Antoine Isaac a écrit :
>
> I'm currently developing a little thesaurus management web application, this point is important for me too
>
>> Indeed, the original idea is that the vocabulary providers would start publish assertions with skos:broader/narrower.
>
> Who do you call the "vocabulary providers" ?


Sorry, "publisher of SKOS data" is maybe clearer.


> If I'm creating a SKOS thesaurus from scratch, using a web GUI that allows me to state either kind of relation, and I know that two concepts have a broaderTransitive relation, what prevents me in the SKOS specification to qualify this relation directly as broaderTransitive ?


Well, nothing prevents you from doing that, but then you have lost some information. Despite the property names, asserting a skos:broader is indeed *more precise* than asserting a skos:broaderTransitive. Because the former implies the latter (mathematically speaking, the skos:broaderTransitive is the transitive closure of the skos:broader relation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitive_closure)



>> Then broader/narrowerTransitive statements could be infered, and materialized either by the thesaurus publisher or by a data consumer.
>
> This leads me to another related question I had : Right now, I'm allowing broaderTransitive relations
> Say
> ex:ConceptA skos:broaderTransitive ex:ConceptB
> ex:ConceptB skos:broaderTransitive ex:ConceptC
>
> Should my thesaurus app creates and maintains the "missing" relations ?
> ex:ConceptA skos:broader ex:ConceptB
> ex:ConceptB skos:broader ex:ConceptC
> ex:ConceptA skos:broader ex:ConceptC


Well, the optimal scenario is that you would assert your skos:broader "individual steps in the hierarchy" first:
ex:ConceptA skos:broader ex:ConceptB
ex:ConceptB skos:broader ex:ConceptC

And then your thesaurus app could create and maintain the transitive relation:
ex:ConceptA skos:broaderTransitive ex:ConceptB
ex:ConceptB skos:broaderTransitive ex:ConceptC
ex:ConceptA skos:broaderTransitive ex:ConceptC

As Christophe has put it, constructing broader/narrower relations from the transitive links, is like reconstructing the causes from the effects.

I hope this makes sense,

Antoine

>
> --
> Dominique Guardiola, QUINODE
> • http://www.quinode.fr/
> • Tel : 04.27.86.84.37
> • Mob : 06.15.13.22.27
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Received on Wednesday, 4 January 2012 18:04:36 UTC