Re: [SKOS] Proposed Resolution for ISSUE 26: RelationshipBetweenLabels

Guus,

I'm uncomfortable with this resolution to the issue. Bearing in mind
that I'm hardly an RDF expert, iIt seems inherently fragile to define
a relationship between 2 literals independent of the concept for which
they are labels.

In the Registry I'm usually thinking in the context of collections of
concept schemes that may have considerable label duplication across
schemes and mapped, transitive relationships between concepts in
multiple schemes. It seems to me that simply declaring a relationship
between literal labels without taking into account the labeled concept
and it's related scheme won't provide the intended results.

What we're really trying to define is a relationship between 2
statements about (properties of) a concept and, unless the object of
the statement is a resource, this looks like a job for the dreaded
reification, rather than the proposed solution.

I'm not happy with the implied need to declare a label as a resource
either, but until someone figures out a way to uniquely identify a
statement as a resource, I don't see an effective way around it.

Unless of course, I'm misunderstanding -- always a distinct possibility.

--Jon

On 2/27/07, Guus Schreiber <schreiber@cs.vu.nl> wrote:
>
> ISSUE-26 [1]
> RelationshipsBetweenLabels
>
> Considering that:
> - representing lexical labels as classes would
> lead to an undesirable complication of SKOS in
> straightforward use cases for the application of SKOS,
> - representing relationships between labels is
> required in some use cases, and therefore an
> escape mechanism should preferably be available
> for such thesauri,
>
> I propose the WG opts for an amended version of
> the second solution proposed in [2]:
>
> RESOLUTION
>
> The WG resolves to add the following classes and
> properties to the SKOS specification [3]:
>
> - the class skos:LabelRelation
> - the properties skos:labelRelationSubject and
> skos:labelRelationObject with domain LabelRelation
> and range rdfs:literal
>
> In addition, the SKOS Guide should describe
> guidelines for SKOS users to define their label
> relations as specializations of LabelRelation and
> gives examples of its intended usage. The SKOS
> specification refrains for now to predefine
> specializations of LabelRelation.
>
> Contrary to the proposal in [2] the class
> LabelRelation is not defined as a subclass of
> skos:Annotation (which is in any case not yet part
> of the spec), as it is not an "annotation", but a
> lexical relationship.
>
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/26
> [2]
> http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/SkosDesign/RelationshipsBetweenLabels
> [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-skos-core-spec/
>
> --
> Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Computer Science
> De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
> T: +31 20 598 7739/7718; F: +31 84 712 1446
> Home page: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~guus/
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 27 February 2007 13:31:29 UTC