Re: SKOS comment - How to better explain why skos:broader is not transitive

Hi,

skos:broaderTransitive means nothing more than 'concept A has concept B has ancestor in a KOS', as indicated in the SKOS Primer.
Indeed in many cases the link won't be very informative. Even when one composes links of one type, within thesauri. The 'hierarchical distance' alone hurts.
We've known this for a while, e.g., http://www.ibiblio.org/fred2.0/wordpress/?p=20
In the absence of consistency rules and fine-grained ontological info being available in every KOS, a simple vocabulary like SKOS won't be able to do much better. This is why we've called for extension (like ISO-THES) to handle the problem in a smarter way.

Antoine

On 4/5/14 1:02 PM, Johan De Smedt wrote:
> Hi Vladimir,
>
> If we consider that broader/narrower a transitive among concepts of the same concept scheme only asserts the existence oh a hierarchical path, then Sofia broader transitive Bulgaria is not meaningless.
> Though I agree it misses more clear semantic details between the linked concept. That more semantic expressiveness is to be handled using dedicated ontologies.
>
> Johan
>
> On Apr 5, 2014 1:37 AM, "Vladimir Alexiev" <vladimir.alexiev@ontotext.com <mailto:vladimir.alexiev@ontotext.com>> wrote:
>
>      > why skos:broader is not  transitive
>
>     Ok, good explanation.
>
>
>     But who can explain why skos:broaderTransitive is not always appropriately transitive?
>
>     E.g. iso-thes:broaderPartitive and iso-thes:broaderInstantial should not compose.
>     E.g. Sofia is part of Bulgaria; Bulgaria is an instance of Country, but Sofia has no relation to Country whatsoever.
>
>     But iso-thes:broaderPartitive and iso-thes:broaderInstantial are declared subprops of skos:broader,
>     and skos:broader feeds unconditionally into skos:broaderTransitive.
>     So it infers Sofia skos:broaderTransitive Country, which is meaningless.
>
>     Cheers! Vladimir
>
>

Received on Saturday, 5 April 2014 18:07:16 UTC