Re: SKOS use cases format

Hi Antoine,

 > My only comment on this point
> would ba about the mail adress. Perhaps we'll find people there 
> reluctant to send something to a complete public group. What do you 
> think of putting one (or more) personal address instead of the WG list? 
> Of course after trivial checking with contributors the use case would be 
> available for the complete WG, that's necessary.

I would defer to Guus/Tom/Ralph on this.

Btw I forgot to add, we should ask for mails sent to 
public-swd-wg@w3.org to have subject line starting with something like 
"SKOS Use Case:".


>> 1.1. What is the title of the vocabulary(ies)?
> 
> We could have this subsection turned into a general description of the 
> vocabulary: additionnally to title, scope and size are important.

+1 on scope and size being important.

>> 1.2. (*) Please provide below some extracts from the vocabulary(ies). 
>> Use the layout or presentation format that you would normally provide 
>> for the users of the vocabulary(ies). Please ensure that the extracts 
>> you provide illustrate all of the features of the vocabulary(ies).
>>
>> 1.3. Describe the structure of the vocabulary(ies). What are the main 
>> building blocks? What types of relationship are used? If you can, 
>> provide examples by referring to the extracts given above.
> 
> Seems to me that we could switch 1.2 and 1.3
> To answer Daniel's concerns about requirements, we might try to be more 
> precise here by mentioning the following points (adapted from a study 
> that a Dutch cultural heritage insitute organized recently for 
> vocabularies, which btw generally contains elements that validate 
> Alistair's proposal)
> - main building blocks: type of descriptive concepts (terms, 
> classification items with codes, etc.), presence of non-descriptive 
> items (qualifiers use to precise the meaning of primitive concepts)
> - structure (what type of relationship): hierarchical (with special 
> interpretation)? associative? management of homonymy/synonymy? Others?
> - organization: are the vocabulary elements gathered according to 
> certain characteristics (facets)?

The difficulty here is not putting words in people's mouths.

The problem is that words like "term" "concept" "qualifier" 
"classification" "primitive" etc. tend to have very different 
operational meanings for different people, even if they might appear 
to be superficially similar. This is probably the greatest difficulty 
of working in this particular field - the terminology is so overloaded 
and poorly defined (ironically :).

Hence when I phrased question 1.3 I tried not to suggest any 
terminology, but rather to invite the author to explain the structure 
of the vocabulary *in their own terms*. The rest of the questions in 
section 1 are there to help us figure out what they mean, from the 
point of view of concrete data structures. The questions in section 3 
are there to help us figure out what they mean from an *operational* 
point of view.

This is an *enormous* reason why I want to focus on the application - 
if we have a clear idea of what functionality we are required to 
enable, we can focus on providing something that will enable that 
functionality, and avoid getting caught up in arguing endlessly at 
cross-purposes about what e.g. a "term" or a "concept" actually "is".

>> 1.4. Is a machine-readable representation of the vocabulary(ies) 
>> already available (e.g. as an XML document)? If so, we'd be grateful 
>> if you could provide some example data or point us to a hyperlink.
>>
>> 1.5. Are any software applications used to create and/or maintain the 
>> vocabulary(ies)? Are there any features which these software 
>> applications currently lack which are required by your use case?
>>
>> 1.6. If a database application is used to store and/or manage the 
>> vocabulary, how is the database structured?
> 
> Are you sure this one is so relevant? It might go into complex features, 
> far from the intended vocabulary model (and from contributors'technical 
> abilities)

Looking at the data they store (or the structure of the database they 
use to store it) gives a very direct indication of what data SKOS will 
be required to convey. I would suggest that this information, if the 
author is able to provide it, will be very helpful in understanding 
the structure of their vocabulary.

We might add "... please provide some example tables of data." ?


>>   Section 2. Vocabulary Mappings
>>
>> In this section we ask you to provide some information about the 
>> mappings or links between vocabularies you would like to be able to 
>> represent using SKOS.
> 
> Here I'm quite puzzled: I like the idea of having a part dedicated to 
> mappings, because SKOS is likely to be also about the links between 
> different concept schemes, but I wonder wether this part should be 
> independant in the questionnaire. It makes the distinction 
> application/vocabularies less pregnant. Why not putting this section as 
> (an optional) subection of the application one?

I don't mind where it goes, as long as it's in there somewhere.

I made it a separate section because it's more like the vocabularies 
section than the application section - we're asking people to present 
and explain some mappings, which might ultimately be used in more than 
one application.

> Just wording: wouldn't "mapping links"be more precise instead of 
> "mapping" alone?

:) I used "mapping" and "links" separately in case they convey 
different things to different people.

To some people, "mapping" is more suggestive of relating vocabularies 
with overlapping scopes, whereas "linking" is more suggestive of 
connecting vocabularies with complementary scope. Ultimately it boils 
down to more or less the same thing, but I just wanted to make sure 
there was some room for interpretation.

> Well, for the moment you are the one to be acknowledged for precious 
> help ;-)

You are too kind :)

Cheers,

Alistair.

-- 
Alistair Miles
Research Associate
CCLRC - Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Building R1 Room 1.60
Fermi Avenue
Chilton
Didcot
Oxfordshire OX11 0QX
United Kingdom
Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
Email: a.j.miles@rl.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1235 445440

Received on Thursday, 23 November 2006 14:42:36 UTC