Re: A new proposal for ISSUE-39 ConceptualMappingLinks

Hi Leonard, Stella,

I assume from your contributions that there is clear requirement for a 
skos:relatedMatch.

Now the problem is with overlappingMatch. In the light of your 
contribution, I would propose to *drop overlappingMatch*, for the two 
following reasons:
- having the two in the vocabulary would cause confusion for SKOS users: 
shall they use relatedMatch or overlappingMatch? In this respect 
Margherita's mail [1]  is very useful: if overlappingMatch is allowed, 
it's difficult to understand the motivation for relatedMatch, and 
reciprocally.
- it is actually possible that the usual interpretation of relatedMatch 
is (or can be made) broad enough to cope with most situation where 
"overlapping" would be thought of.

The only situation where I can think of problem is when applications 
deal with purely extension-based links that have no clear thesaurus-like 
semantic link, like the "France"/"war" I used in [2]. But even if this 
kind of link cannot be made relatedMatch (which can also be argued, in 
fact) we can hypothesize that these would be very specific applications. 
And we would encourage them to define their own relationships. Which by 
the way they are likely to do, if they focus only on documents, e.g. by 
introducing different levels of extensional overlap (30%, 50%, etc)

Best,

Antoine


[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2007Dec/0022.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2007Dec/0007.html

>
> On Fri, 7 Dec 2007 at 15:43:48, Stella Dextre Clarke 
> <sdclarke@lukehouse.demon.co.uk> wrote
>>> (ISSUE-39C) What's the difference between "related" and
>>> "overlapping"? Is there enough precedent to justify a new
>>> property for "overlapping"?
>> Three options have been discussed, namely related, overlapping and 
>> inexact. I guess I am biased by long familiarity with "related". I 
>> feel it is sufficient to choose just one, and that it should be 
>> "related". It seems to me that "overlapping" is a subset of related, 
>> and harder for simple people to use in a hurry. The definition of the 
>> associative relationship (RT/RT) in a thesaurus has always been 
>> subjective, which some people see as a failing (but I see it as a 
>> strength, so long as we recognise that the fuzziness is present).
>
> I agree with Stella that in the traditional thesaurus structure 
> overlapping terms have generally been treated as related terms. In 
> BS8723-2:2005 we discussed this in paragraph 8.4.2: "Preferred terms 
> with overlapping meanings", with the example of "ships" and "boats". 
> Another example might be "students" and "pupils".
>
> It would be valid to define "overlapping" as a distinct type of 
> relationship, where the scopes of two concepts overlap but neither is 
> contained within the other. One specific feature of an "overlapping" 
> relationship is that both concepts must fall within the same facet, 
> e.g. "objects" or "people" in the examples above. Related term 
> relationships are often, though not necessarily, between concepts in 
> different facets, such as "ships RT sailors" or "pupils RT teaching".
>
> The question is whether making this distinction is useful. In a 
> thesaurus intended for human rather than machine interpretation, all 
> that is needed is a way of saying "you have asked for A; you might 
> also find it useful to consider using B in your search statement".
>
> Going further than this means moving into the role of ontologies 
> designed to allow machines to make these decisions. As I understand 
> it, that is not the purpose of SKOS.
>
> Leonard

Received on Monday, 10 December 2007 11:24:10 UTC