RE: SemWeb terminology page

In her book "The intellectual foundation of information organization"  
Svenonius has a section on controlled and uncontrolled vocabularies.  
Her statement about controlled vocabularies says:

"[Controlled vocabularies] are constructs in an artificial language;  
their purpose is to map users' vocabulary to a standardized vocabulary  
and to bring like information together." (p.88) [1]

Do we agree that this is the role of our #1 group? I ask because I  
perceive this to be different from the original proposed definition:

"These describe concepts that are used in actual metadata."

If you look at FRAD [2] you see that the assignment of terminology to  
the concept is of equal or greater importance than any description of  
the concept itself. In fact, that's what I would emphasize as the role  
of a controlled vocabulary: that it is a method to *control* *language  
terms*. Many controlled vocabularies have minimal information about  
the concepts, but all exist to make a selection of particular terms of  
use.

kc

[1] http://openlibrary.org/works/OL475973W -- a basic foundation for  
how librarianship views KO.
[2]  
http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-authority-data

Quoting "Young,Jeff (OR)" <jyoung@oclc.org>:

>> > It would be odd to dismiss SKOS because we determined it was
> designed
>> to
>> > manage "concepts" rather than "controlled vocabularies".
>>
>> I certainly wouldn't want to dismiss SKOS!  The point is that
>> SKOS organizes sets of lexical strings via underlying concepts.
>
> I would argue that "organizing" concepts or labels is getting into
> optional features of SKOS. Your other comments indicate you would agree.
> The essential features for authority control, in my view, are the
> ability to identify something real (a skos:Concept), associate them in a
> scheme (via skos:inScheme) and give them skos:pref/altLabels
> (potentially  "real" via skosxl:Label). Some forms of authority control
> may want to use additional gravy from SKOS, but others could just as
> well link out to other models via foaf:focus and organize from there.
> Either or both ways, SKOS can act as a schematic naming network.
>
> Jeff
>
>
>



-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Friday, 3 December 2010 23:15:57 UTC