ISSUE-150: Last Call Comment: Subsumption hierarchies

Dear Erik,

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

On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 09:18:49PM +0000, SWD Issue Tracker wrote:
> 
> 
> ISSUE-150: Last Call Comment: Subsumption hierarchies
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/150
> 
> Raised by: Alistair Miles
> On product: SKOS
> 
> Raised by Erik Hennum in [1]:
> 
> """
> We've had a need to distinguish subsumptive relations (for which we
> currently use the SKOS broaderGeneric / narrowerGeneric extension) from
> broader relations where the broader concept is not fully subsumptive.
> 
> For instance, there is consensus in our target audience that the concept of
> Linux subsumes the concept of RedHat Linux.  By contrast, the High
> Availability concept subsumes the overall purpose but not the operational
> tasks associated with the Disaster Recovery concept.  (In passing,
> subsumption relations seem much more common between proper-noun concepts
> than between general concepts.)
> 
> The distinction is important because subsumption is much more reliable for
> qualifying content during search applications (and can be treated as
> strongly transitive).  Has the committee considered carrying forward this
> experimental distinction from the previous version of SKOS as an optional
> subproperty of broader / narrower?
> """

Yes, the working group has considered carrying forward the
experimental extensions to skos:broader and skos:narrower. This was
discussed as ISSUE-56. In May the WG resolved to postpone this issue
[2], because we do not yet have sufficient information on how to embed
the specialisations in the current SKOS model. The view was that
further work, in particular on patterns and conventions for using SKOS
and OWL in combination, was required before a standard set of
extensions could be proposed.

We encourage the development and publication of third-party extensions
to the SKOS data model within the community of practice. The SKOS
Reference (section 8.6.3) and the SKOS Primer (section 4.7) provide
information and examples of how to do this.

Can you live with the postponement of this issue?

Kind regards,

Alistair
Sean

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Jun/0103.html
[ISSUE-56] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/56 
[2] http://www.w3.org/2008/05/07-swd-minutes.html#item02

-- 
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 09:29:23 UTC