Brief introduction and some notes on ISSUE-41 (alt/alternative): use of skos:altLabel or dcterms:alternative [Registered Organization Vocabulary]

Hello all,

to briefly introduce myself as a new member, since 2011 I have been working with Agis Papantoniou, whom you probably know from this WG, at NTUA in ontology engineering and semantic technologies involving government and economic LD. As an example, you might have heard from Agis the publicspending.gr project, which is an effort to generate, cleanse, interlink and publish greek public spending data and business registry data (and hopefully more datasets to come) as LD. Let me say that it's an honor to be part of this WG and hopefully I can provide some useful feedback as soon as I cover the missing ground and catch up.

Let me jump to Issue 41 [1] and Dave Reynold's suggestion of making rov:legalName a super-property of skos:prefLabel.


> How about one small variant to this approach. We could make
> rov:legalName a super property of skos:prefLabel.
>
> So whenever there is a unique legal name we need only use skos:prefLabel
> and this also implies rov:legalName.
>
> That way there would always be (at least implicitly) a rov:legalName and
> a skos:prefLabel, it's just that there might be additional
> rov:legalNames as well.

While this may be convenient for the particular issue, it raises the following question:
Every time skos:prefLabel is used, it is implied that rov:legalName is used as well. However, the definition of rov:legalName makes it domain-dependent (as it is essentially bound to RegOrg) in a way that skos:prefLabel is not and this creates an inconsistency every time skos:prefLabel is used outside the scope of organizations, as it applies meaning that is not always there. This means that skos:prefLabel and rov:legalName are not necessarily connected by subsumption either way.

The problem is that the restriction that resources should have unique skos:prefLabel(s) of the same language causes an inconvenience in cases where it is actually allowed for organizations to carry more than one legal names of the same language.
I assume SKOS will not be revised in order to allow multiple skos:prefLabel(s) of the same language (and it really should not). This either means that RegOrg should address the skos:prefLabel issue naively, allowing for the modeller to randomly select a skos:prefLabel from the list of (supposedly equally-weighted) legal names of the same language, or not use the skos:prefLabel property at all. In the first case the rov:legalName property will be used for all names, and one of them will also be assigned the skos:prefLabel property as well. Ultimately the preference can be given randomly or following a set of preference criteria (e.g. based on length etc.) as this will mainly be used for better rendering to human-readable terms. The second case is SKOS-incompatible which doesn't really make it a viable option at this point from what I understand.

Thanks for your time and once again, it is nice to be part of this nice WG.


Kind regards,
Marios Meimaris


[1] http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/track/issues/41

Received on Monday, 4 March 2013 14:30:36 UTC