WP8 Thesauri - our items for meeting Thursday

We would like some discussion to centre on what we have so far produced in 
the way of:
1. - scope
2. - scenarios
3. - use cases
which we see as an important first step in developing the definition of a 
web service API for access to a thesaurus service


1. SCOPE

Please comment on whether we should widen/narrow our scope:

a) A thesaurus service accessible to the end-user as some sort of
   tool e.g. on a browser sidebar

b) A "3rd party" thesaurus service, available for machine to machine
   (M2M) networking



2. SCENARIOS

Would anyone like to add to/comment on these scenarios:

***********
Human end user:
***********

- Jim Hendler's use case (from rdf interest): marking up web
  resources using a thesaurus service

- marking up resources for a specific user community
  e.g. SOSIG (social sciences) cataloguer

- Alistair Miles's use case: tool support for better searching and
  also browsing using web search engines s.a. Google
  [a similar scenario applies for example to a SOSIG end user]


**************
M2M
**************

- Cross-search
  ("invisible") better query recall across a set of data
  repositories, e.g. this would extend a tool like SPP's xsearch

- Cross-browse
  end-users "seamlessly" browsing a hierarchy of categories
  represented across many data repositories in order to refine their
  search terms, for example when 2 or more KOS's have been "federated"



3. USE CASES

The set of "questions" that might be asked of either type of service seem
to be the same for both and include the following. Comments please.

Assumption: in the following questions we assume that concepts are
identified by their single preferred term (and can have multiple
non-preferred terms).  However, we anticipate that concept URIs may
also be part of such questions/exchanges:
   "give me the URI of the concept in thesaurus Y identified by this
   preferred term X"
or in the case of checking whether the preferred term for some concept
has perhaps changed, which would lead to the question:
  "give me the preferred term in thesaurus Y for the concept
  identified by this URI X"
We may build these use cases in.

*** asking for information pertaining to a single thesaurus ****

- "give me a list of preferred and non-preferred terms in some thesaurus Y 
matching some submitted keyword" 

  [a cataloguer/searcher who needs to know any terms that are a
  potential match for some keyword - permitting truncation or
  stemming. Essentially, the user is trying to find an "entry" point
  into some thesaurus that they are unfamiliar with]

- "give me the non-preferred term(s) for some concept X in some thesaurus Y"

- "give me the scope note for some concept X in some thesaurus Y"

- "give me the broader/narrower/related term for some term Z in some
   thesaurus Y"

- "give me all "top" (/root) terms for a preferred term X/concept Z in some 
   thesaurus Y"

[
- "give me metadata about thesaurus Y (s.a. it's language, its
  creator, version ???)"
]

[Advanced: 
- perhaps some further questions based around the idea of asking for
  the *type* of relations between hierarchical terms within a
  thesaurus for example 'broader-generic', 'broader-partitive'
  (part-of) as in your document, 
 
   Or are we keeping that sort of data "behind the scenes"?
]



*** asking for information re mappings between thesauri ***

- "give me the equivalent term(s) for X in some target thesaurus/thesauri
  if it exists, or partial equivalent if it exists"

Dave and Nikki

Received on Wednesday, 22 October 2003 12:35:14 UTC