[SKOS] semantics

Hi all,

There are two basic challenges with respect to the semantics of SKOS.

Firstly, what are the semantics of SKOS?

Secondly, how should the semantics of SKOS be specified?

Niether question is trivial.

The difficulty with the first question is that, while there are some semantic conditions which are intuitively obvious (such as skos:broader and skos:narrower being each other's inverse), there are others which are not at all obvious and for which there may be viable alternatives (such as reflexivity of skos:broader).

The difficulty with the second question is that, even if we only consider those semantic conditions which are not contentious, not all of those conditions may be specified by means of either RDFS or OWL assertions.

One *possible* way forward would be to define the semantics of SKOS as a semantic extension of RDFS, using the definitions and notational conventions laid out in the RDF Semantics [1].

To explore the feasibility of this approach, and to provide a concrete basis for discussion of specific semantic conditions, I have written a draft semantics of SKOS as a semantic extension of RDFS:

[2] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/SkosDesign/RdfsSemanticExtension?action=recall&rev=6

Note that this draft only considers a limited subset of the current SKOS vocabulary - but don't worry, there is still plenty of potential for debate :)

[DONE] ACTION: Alistair to summarizes the aspects of semantics of the skos data model [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2007/01/22-swd-minutes.html#action06]

Cheers,

Alistair.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-mt-20040210/

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

Received on Thursday, 8 February 2007 11:08:04 UTC