skos:related typing

I have been lurking on this list for a few months trying to catch up
with the discussion.  My apologies in advance if my question is
something that has been dealt with in previous discussions that I
haven't found.

Background for my question:  We are a running a production semantic(ish)
engine that maintains an enterprise thesaurus driving cataloging and
facetted navigation for knowledge management and our corporate intranet.
We currently have 45K Concepts with 500K+ documents associated with
those concepts and have been in production since 1997.

As part of an enterprise rearchitecture, we are looking at the
feasibility of using SKOS as a vehicle for providing thesaural
information to other enterprise systems outside of the KM, DM, and web
domains as a web service.

Most of what I see in SKOS maps very cleanly into what we have been
doing for the last 10 years with the differences mainly being in what we
called things and, of course, in that we aren't currently expressing in
XML because XML was not yet a standard in 1997. 

The biggest delta is with skos:related.  In my context, I need to be
able to track not just that there exists a relationship, but what the
nature of that relationship is.  An easy example out of many:

Product A is our product.  Products B and C are products of a
competitor.  Product A is related to Product B as a competing product
(which allows us to do things like put competitive intelligence
materials about B on A's intranet page).  Products A and C are related
because Product A is compatible with Product C.  That is, we can sell
our Product A into an established Product C environment.  The
information that I want to give the sales person is our story about that
compatibility rather than competitive information about Product C.  I
can easily come up with a couple of dozen other situations where I want
typed relationships.

My inclination is that I want to put an additional rdf attribute in the
skos:related element to indicate the type of relationship.  However, if
I have been reading this discussions on this list correctly, I shouldn't
be adding additional formal attributes within skos elements.  (Is this a
correct understanding?)

Has this issue been addressed within the SKOS discussions?

Received on Tuesday, 25 December 2007 05:15:04 UTC