"Drawing the Pictures"

In the telecon yesterday, I raised the question of whether we should
be providing some kind of metamodel for SKOS. Just to clarify, I'm not
necessarily calling for a formalised model with mapping rules and
translations into the underlying RDF (as for example, we have with
OWL). Rather, I was thinking of something (could be UML diagrams,
could be simply blobs and lines) that tries to capture some of our
underlying intuitions about the SKOS model. I think Elisa captured
what I meant well when she said "drawing the pictures".

I believe that would then help in pinning down what we mean by
'containment', 'aggregation' etc. For example, do we consider the
relationships between concepts to be part of a scheme? Do we consider
the concepts to be part of the scheme? Do we consider the
relationships of a concept to be somehow part of the concept? Can
concepts "exist" independently of a scheme? In my personal experience
with OWL (and your mileage may of course, vary), thinking about things
at a higher level of abstraction than the RDF triple structure made it
easier to see what was going on and how things fit together.

This certainly doesn't have to be normative, and in fact may not even
need to form part of our final document set. I think it would benefit
the process though. This would perhaps best be something to do in a
F2F context (as I think was also mooted).

	Sean

--
Sean Bechhofer
School of Computer Science
University of Manchester
sean.bechhofer@manchester.ac.uk
http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/people/bechhofer

Received on Wednesday, 8 August 2007 09:45:46 UTC