[SKOS] Re: SKOS comment: Last Call Working Draft [ISSUE-184]

Dear Michael,

Thank you for your comments [1]:

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4. skos:notation and skos:prefLabel are overlapping

There are two issues here: 1, Most notation in classification schemes is
preferred (i.e., standard) notation. Should both skos:notation and
skos:prefLabel be used for all these cases?

2, On some occasions an alternative (i.e., optional) notation is given
for a concept. For example, inScheme CCT:
     [Q89] environmental biology
         Preferred class: X17

Regardless whether it is preferred or alternative, the notation always
represents a unique concept and therefore has semantic relationships.
Hence, an alternative notation is not a non-preferred thesaurus label,
which has only lexical relationships.

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Regarding your first comment, we would like to emphasize that you are 
free to use both skos:notation and the "private language tag" solutions 
and as you see fit. In particular, you can also use only one of them, 
for example if you do not want to coin a datatype of your own to be 
used with skos:notation. Assuming that the "preferred" aspect of a 
notation is what you really want to emphasize on, you can thus use 
skos:prefLabel only or skos:prefLabel and skos:notation, as you propose.

Regarding the second aspect, nothing prevents the use 
skos:altLabel, in combination with private use tags, to express that a 
notation has an "alternative" flavour.
Further, in SKOS the semantic relationships are attached to concepts and 
not to their lexicalizations, whether preferred or alternative. Your 
Q89/X17 example could be represented as:
ex:x17 rdf:type skos:Concept ;
        skos:broader ex:x1 ;
        skos:prefLabel "environmental biology"@en ;
        skos:prefLabel "x17"@x-notation-mynotation ;
        skos:altLabel "q85"@x-notation-mynotation ;
(assuming that your "X17" has "X1" as a parent class)
There is no essential difference, as far as semantic relations 
are concerned, between representing notations as alternative or 
preferred labels.

I hope this addresses your concerns appropriately. As we believe that 
the current SKOS model satisfies the requirements you 
mentioned, we propose to *close* ISSUE-184 [ISSUE-184], making no change 
to the existing SKOS documents. *We hope that you are able to live with 
this.*

Note that if you come with a better solution, we encourage you to 
publish a brief note or a third-party extension proposal, and inform the 
SKOS community via the mailing list. This is important for us, and we'd 
be happy to set up a "community best practices" wiki page to collect 
links to such statements.

Best regards,

Antoine

[ISSUE-184] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/184
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Oct/0061.html

Received on Tuesday, 4 November 2008 21:00:28 UTC