Re: SKOS comment (s) from PFWG [ISSUE-129]

Dear Al

Thank you for your comments [1]:

"""
Re Section 5. Lexical Labels

The motivation for the Integrity Conditions listed in section 5.4.
(S13 and S14) is not clear.  They appear to be overly constraining
and badly aligned with the architecture of distributed systems, where
labels could come from different sources and authors, and where
redundancies may arise.  Why is it okay to have no preferred label
defined, but it is a clash to have the same string as preferred and
alternate label?

A SKOS application should be able to deal with situations where there
are competing preferred labels, or one label being redundantly
defined as “preferred” and “alternate”.  These situations should not
make the SKOS application fail.
"""

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The desire to provide a single value of preferred label is motivated  
by requirement R-CompatibilityWithISO2788 [2] and thesaurus  
guidelines provided the main motivation for the uniqueness of  
prefLabels. We also suggest that the intuitive interpretation of  
"preferred" implies a single choice. Note that the integrity  
conditions specify "no more than one preferred label per language  
[tag]", thus custom language tags /could/ be used in situations where  
competing preferred labels were needed.

Note also that the presence of multiple preferred labels does not  
necessarily lead to *failure* of a SKOS application. Section 1.4 of  
the Reference document provides further discussion relating to the  
use of integrity conditions in SKOS.

The Working Group propose to make no change in response to your  
comment. Can you live with this?

Cheers,

	Sean Bechhofer
	Alistair Miles

[ISSUE-179] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/179
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Oct/0063.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-ucr#R-CompatibilityWithISO2788

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

Received on Monday, 20 October 2008 17:27:58 UTC