Re: about the skos mapping of vocabularies

Hi all,

> One  question, form a non-specialist, to answer PA's comment at the last 
> teleconf: he said, if I understood correctly, that it might be very hard 
> to have an API using mappings defined in SKOS. The Cliopatria API [1] 
> (also described more extensively in papers like [2]) seems, again to my 
> understanding, to be using vocabularies and vocabularies mappings (in 
> SKOS) to access and display the metadata of objects from different 
> collections, described with their own description schema. Would 
> Cliopatria be an interesting API to have a closer look in out own case?

The statement about Cliopatria is true.
The ESW wiki maintains a list of tools implementing SKOS, see 
http://esw.w3.org/topic/SkosDev/ToolShed

Yes, the SKOS/OWL mappings do not necessarily say everything about 
mappings. The famous example is:
   . Vocabulary A defines: firstName and lastName properties
   . Vocabulary B defines: name property
Ideally, we would like to state:
   b:name = a:firstName + a:lastName where the semantics of the '+' is 
here a string concatenation
We could already say:
   a:firstName rdfs:subPropertyOf b:name
   a:lastName rdfs:subPropertyOf b:name
or an equivalent in SKOS.

The problem mentioned by PA is somehow similar: a conversion between 
units. There are plenty of algebra that provides the constructs for 
expressing such statements. XPATH is built on them.
It is worth to investigate what the ontology alignment community has 
produced since this problem has been already researched. Actually, 
someone might have already propose a way of representing exactly that in 
OWL. Pierre Antoine, is this a question you could ask to Jérôme?
Cheers.

   Raphaël

-- 
Raphaël Troncy
CWI (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science),
Science Park 123, 1098 XG Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: raphael.troncy@cwi.nl & raphael.troncy@gmail.com
Tel: +31 (0)20 - 592 4093
Fax: +31 (0)20 - 592 4312
Web: http://www.cwi.nl/~troncy/

Received on Tuesday, 31 March 2009 13:14:30 UTC