Re: [VM] Scoping Draft with questions to TF members $swbpd

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
> 

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Received on Friday, 10 September 2004 14:52:01 UTC