ISSUE-146: Last Call Comment: broadMatch and skos:narrowMatch ?should be used only when there are no exact or close matches for ?the term elsewhere?

Dear Margie,

Thank you for you support and your helpful comments. In response to
your comment below:

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 12:00:44PM +0000, SWD Issue Tracker wrote:
> 
> 
> ISSUE-146: Last Call Comment: broadMatch and skos:narrowMatch should be used only when there are no exact or close matches for the term elsewhere?
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/146
> 
> Raised by: Alistair Miles
> On product: SKOS
> 
> Raised by Margie Hlava in [1]:
> 
> """
> This is excellent work and generally a map can be made from a ANSI/NISO or 
> a BSI or even and ISO thesaurus or controlled vocabulary standard to SKOS.  
> However there are still a few confusions which prevent one from insuring 
> complete interoperability from one to another.  This is represented by the 
> section 10. Mapping Properties
> 
> skos: broadMatch and skos:narrowMatch should be used only when there are
> no exact or close matches for the term elsewhere?

Questions of best practice such as this are deemed out of scope for
the SKOS Reference. We hope that answers to questions such as this
will emerge in the future within the community of practice, in
response to implementation experience. We propose to make no change to
the SKOS Reference, can you live with this?

> A taxonomic view of a thesaurus depends on the broader term narrower term 
> relationships.  To SKOS this is not as important as the synonym (also known 
> as equivalence) relationships.  The parent child, genus species, broader 
> narrower term designations allows browse-able or navigational search.  This 
> technique has taken much of the information industry  by storm for the last 
> couple of years.  To allow this only as an after thought in SKOS is to 
> marginalize an important area in findability.

We believe the SKOS Reference makes no judgment as to the relative
importance of the different types of relationship. Can you live with
the document as-is?

Kind regards,

Alistair
Sean

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Sep/0055.html

-- 
Alistair Miles
Senior Computing Officer
Image Bioinformatics Research Group
Department of Zoology
The Tinbergen Building
University of Oxford
South Parks Road
Oxford
OX1 3PS
United Kingdom
Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
Email: alistair.miles@zoo.ox.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1865 281993

Received on Thursday, 6 November 2008 09:25:31 UTC