Re: SKOS transitive hierarchical relations

Hi Antoine!

> One use case for broaderTransitive is the one of a data consumer 
> willing to use the information that a concept C is broader than 
> concept A, whatever other concept exist "between them" in the 
> conceptual hierarchy. This is especially useful for information 
> retrieval.
> One use case for broader is to be able to easily access the 
> "individual hierarchy steps" which are present in a thesaurus. For 
> example, when you want to display a thesaurus tree, it makes a big 
> difference to know that there is a concept B which is broader than C 
> but narrower than A.
>
> Now, if a data publisher releases only broaderTransitive, this is a 
> pity because information is lost, as explained in my other mail today 
> [1]. I know that in many cases you could retrieve the "original" 
> skos:broader statements from skos:broaderTransitive one. But:
> - this would require an algorithm which is not so trivial
> - in some cases, the assumptions on which such an algorithm would 
> typically rely on are in fact wrong. These cases are very rare, but 
> still...
>
> So considering all these things, we opted for the current structure. 
> Believe me, we have considered the issue quite seriously in the 
> Semantic web Deployment group... I know that it may look sub-optimal, 
> but this is really the best we could came up with at the time.

Good thanks for this clear explanation. I will revise this, and we will 
revise UMBEL according to this new information, and we may release a new 
structure soon that would "fix" that issue.

Thanks

Take care,

Fred

Received on Wednesday, 4 January 2012 18:46:10 UTC