- From: Guus Schreiber <schreiber@cs.vu.nl>
- Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 16:51:57 +0200
- To: Thomas Baker <thomas.baker@bi.fhg.de>
- CC: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>, "Uschold, Michael F" <michael.f.uschold@boeing.com>, SW Best Practices <public-swbp-wg@w3.org>
Dan Brickley wrote: [..] >> * Thomas Baker <thomas.baker@bi.fhg.de> [2004-09-10 10:13+0200] >>Have I correctly understood that you mean to say: >> >> There are two alternative ways one might use OWL to >> express a thesaurus: One could use native OWL constructs to >> represent thesaurus relations. Or one could use OWL first >> to represent a language of thesaurus relations and then use >> that relation language to represent the thesaurus itself. >> >>If so, I'm thinking the VM Note might state the issue, present >>a few arguments each way, and point off to any available >>sources of emerging solutions. Does that sound reasonable? > > The SKOS work is one such approach. It uses RDF (and bits of OWL I > think) to describe relations like 'broader' that map to the way > thesaurus-style systems describe the world. Re-modelling a thesaurus as > an ontology is a seriously expensive and challenging effort; it'd be > good to have better docs to assist those who attempt this, but more > important is to make sure our enthusiasm for OWL modelling doesn't obscure the > potential value of thesauri-in-RDF approaches... So for example, representing that Painting is narrower term of ArtObject as (1) ex:Painting rdfs:subClassOf ex:ArtObject makes a (strong) ontological commitment, whereas (2) ex:Painting ex:narrowerTerm ex:ArtObject is a neutral "as-is" representation. For approach (2) SKOS provides a standard set of definitions for things like "broader/narrower term", based on the ISO standard. There is an overlap here with the PORT task force, which (I hope) will provide guidelines for such representations. Guus > > Maybe Alistair can comment further? > > Dan > -- Free University Amsterdam, Computer Science De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel: +31 20 444 7739/7718 E-mail: schreiber@cs.vu.nl Home page: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~guus/
Received on Friday, 10 September 2004 14:52:01 UTC