ISSUE-160: Allowing collections in semantic relationships

ISSUE-160: Allowing collections in semantic relationships

http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/160

Raised by: Antoine Isaac
On product: All

Raised by Doug Tudhope in [1]

While SKOS collections represents best practice in thesaurus construction, many
prominent existing thesauri (and related KOS) do not follow the SKOS collections
semantics. Instead, they model guide terms, facet indicators etc as part of a
hierarchy using standard Broader/Narrower relationships. This creates a problem
in converting such existing KOS into SKOS. From discussions it appears other
people have come to a similar judgment in converting such cases to SKOS – being
reluctant to change the existing structure of a KOS designed by a third party.
The pragmatic decision is often to create a (nonSKOS) property of a concept, to
say essentially, ‘NOT_FOR_INDEXING’. This allows a basic distinction to be made
between a facet indicator (or guide term) and a concept available for indexing.

Can we consider if something like this could be introduced into SKOS to
facilitate conversion of many legacy KOS? The primer can always encourage the
full collections approach as best practice.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Oct/0062.html

Received on Saturday, 4 October 2008 13:55:02 UTC