Re: [SKOS] ACTION on relating skos:Concept to a foaf:Person

On Wednesday 20 June 2007 23:27, aisaac@few.vu.nl wrote:
> Both problems are similar in the sense that they are concerned about
> how to link a concept with some real-world-anchored reference, be it
> an object or a set of objects. But they have subtle differences.
> Following and extending what is written in the SKOS core guide about
> dc:creator, you can say that the dc:creator of the concept
> mythesaurus:KingOfEngland is Antoine Isaac and that Antoine Isaac is
> also the creator of the class myontology:KingsOfEngland. However if I
> can be the dc:creator of mythesaurus:henryVIIIConcept, I cannot be
> the dc:creator of myontology:henryVIIIPerson, because the creators of
> henry VIII are his parents.

Yes, indeed, they are different, and the problem is that I have tried 
and failed to create a reasonable UI to allow people to select the 
predicate (the code is running on http://my.opera.com/ so if somebody 
wants to have a look into how it performs, I'd encourage you to get 
account), so that they could clearly state the semantics of that link. 
That is not to say it can't be done, better UI designers than me could 
do it one day. But there is an immediate need that needs to be met. 

In fact, I think this would be the need for most sites that uses tags 
(del.icio.us, flickr, youtube, etc), and given that quite a lot of 
annotation is available as tags, I would think that not supporting it 
would be unwise.

So, what I need is a property where the exact meaning is not as clearly 
defined as was intended with skos:it, I think. So, yeah, it is probably 
not quite skos:it I want. 

It is a better-than-nothing property. For the property I need, the exact 
semantics of the relationship between the concept and the thing is not 
defined, but that doesn't mean that the somewhat fuzzy relationship is 
not useful, as the uptake of tags has shown the amount of annotation 
people are willing to do creates a useful amount of data, and you can 
at least with some probability infer that a picture that has some 
relationship to the concept if it is tagged that way. It is more useful 
than not having any annotation at all.

The skos:it, or similar, could be a refinement that clearly defines this 
meaning, so that when a better UI designer comes around, users that 
wants to specify it can do so.

Cheers,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Semantic Web Specialist
Opera Software ASA

Received on Thursday, 21 June 2007 09:00:31 UTC