RE: ISSUE-135: Last Call Comment: rdfs:label

Alistair Miles wrote:

>The Working Group thus propose to change the type of the SKOS
>labelling properties to owl:AnnotationProperty, and *postpone* this
>issue (indicating that it may merit further consideration in the
>future). Can you live with this?

I think that closing this issue as /postponed/ does not make much sense. A future WG will have no real option to remove the connection from rdfs:Label without largely breaking backwards compatibility. So I suggest to close the issue as 
resolved, eventually.

But my concern is more on the chosen design, not so much on whether there is a problem with OWL DL. It looks to me that SKOS generally provides for the different kinds of properties a small, shallow property hierarchy, having some SKOS property as their upper property. For example, there is the idea of "notes", and therefore there is a general property "skos:note", having all concrete kinds of SKOS notes below. This pretty well represents the notion of having "several kinds of SKOS notes, namely editorial notes (skos:editorialNote), change notes (skos:changeNote), etc. But for labels, there is no general SKOS label, but all concrete kinds of labels directly inherit from rdfs:label. This looks like a hack to me.

My proposal is to introduce a skos:label property, being a sub property of rdfs:label, and all concrete label properties are sub properties of skos:label. Semantically, nothing would be changed by this. In particular all current kinds of SKOS labels would still be rdfs:label's. But one then don't has to refer to RDFS labels, i.e. go outside of SKOS, if one wants to generally talk about labels in SKOS.

I think this change would better match the rest of the SKOS design. But this is just a suggestion. I wouldn't oppose if you deny this idea.

>Kind regards,
>
>	Sean Bechhofer
>	Alistair Miles

Best regards,
Michael

--
Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
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