Re: ISSUE-149: Last Call Comment: Asymmetric associations

Here is a draft response to Erik on ISSUE-149, comments welcome.

--- begin draft response ---

Dear Erik, 

Many thanks for your helpful comments. In response to your comment
below:

On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 09:17:15PM +0000, SWD Issue Tracker wrote:
> 
> 
> ISSUE-149: Last Call Comment: Asymmetric associations 
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/149
> 
> Raised by: Alistair Miles
> On product: SKOS
> 
> Raised by Erik Hennum in [1]:
> 
> """
> In our experience, while we've had no need for symmetric associations,
> we've had considerable need for directional, non-hierarchical associations.
> For instance, our target audience perceives a directional association
> between a hardware platform and the operating systems that run on the
> platform and again between an operating system and the software
> applications that run on the operating system.
> 
> In Section 8.6.3. Symmetry of skos:related, the draft makes a point of
> providing examples of asymmetric subproperties of skos:related, suggesting
> that our experience may not be unusual.
> 
> Is this requirement sufficiently common that it makes sense to provide an
> asymmetric subproperty of skos:related as part of the standard rather than
> have many adopters solve the same problem in different ways?  Effectively,
> this subproperty would be a broader / narrower relationships that does
> _not_ entail or imply the weak transitive associations that construct the
> hierarchy.
> """

While we are sympathetic to these requirements, at the current time we
propose to postpone development of a standard solution and leave it
for future working groups or for third party extensions developed
within the community of practice. Both the SKOS Reference (section
8.6.3) and the SKOS Primer (section 4.7) currently provide examples of
how to develop third party extensions to SKOS semantic relations. Can
you live with this?

Kind regards,

Alistair
Sean

> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Jun/0103.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 Wednesday, 22 October 2008 16:43:32 UTC