RE: [SKOS]: [ISSUE 44] BroaderNarrowerSemantics

Sorry, but I disagree with the suggestion that people define 
transitivity for themselves. SKOS should not leave such things 
undefined--to do so guarantees people will have different semantics 
for SKOS properties which will prevent interoperability.

Daniel

At 10:34 AM 12/17/2007, Sini, Margherita (KCEW) wrote:

>Ok seems also reasonable to me to allow users to define transitivity....
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: public-swd-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-swd-wg-request@w3.org] On
>Behalf Of Ed Summers
>Sent: 17 December 2007 19:25
>To: public-swd-wg@w3.org; public-esw-thes@w3.org
>Subject: Re: [SKOS]: [ISSUE 44] BroaderNarrowerSemantics
>
>
>
>Thanks to all for this gentle schooling in how important the broader/narrower
>transitivity issue is--especially for the Library of Congress Subject
>Headings. I must admit, I had no idea that the broader/narrower semantics in
>LCSH were this flawed, and recognized as such even when they were first
>introduced in 1988 [1]. I suppose if the semantics around broader/narrower
>were declared to be transitive the SKOS representation of LCSH would simply
>be making explicit this implicit brokenness. Who knows it could be a tool for
>gradually improving LCSH along the lines that Margherita mentions...but the
>problems seem quite endemic.
>
>I'm curious though: what are the disadvantages of having SKOS say nothing
>about broader/narrower transitivity, and letting users define these triples
>if they are important for their application? This would allow looser KOS like
>LCSH to be represented in roughly the same way as more rigorous KOS.
>Developers who desired inferencing across broader/narrower could then add
>triples stating that transitivity. Is the perception that this would
>drastically reduce the interoperability of SKOS data, and if so how?
>
>//Ed
>
>[1] Dykstra, Mary. "LC Subject Headings Disguised as Thesaurus", Library
>Journal, March 1, 1988, p 42-46.