Re: SKOS queries

On 27 Sep 2007, at 09:50, Quentin Reul wrote:

>
> Hi Antoine,
>
> The goal of SKOS is to share knowledge organisation, such as  
> thesauri over the web. Imagine that a user defines a thesaurus  
> containing only skos:broader relations between skos:Concept. If  
> skos:broader and skos:narrower are not transitive, a user x who  
> wants to use this thesaurus to find all narrower concepts of a  
> concept will have to add the relation to every concept in the  
> thesaurus. Hence, transitivity between these relations enable a  
> better sharing among user.

I think there is some confusion here about "transitivity". The  
skos:broader and skos:narrower relations are intended to be / 
inverses/. If the user defines a thesaurus that contains only  
skos:broader relationships, then an application/implementation that  
respects the SKOS semantics should be able to tell me about  
skos:narrower relationships. So from

a skos:broader b

I should be able to get that

b skos:narrower a

If skos:broader is /transitive/, then from

a skos:broader b
b skos:broader c

then I can infer

a skos:broader c

It is not clear that broader/narrower should necessarily be  
transitive relations. As Antoine said, a decision regarding  
transitivity of the relations depends very much on requirements and  
use cases.

	Sean

--
Sean Bechhofer
School of Computer Science
University of Manchester
sean.bechhofer@manchester.ac.uk
http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/people/bechhofer

Received on Thursday, 27 September 2007 16:19:59 UTC