Re: SKOS comment: name "broader" confusing

On 7/4/09 21:22, Barclay, Daniel wrote:
> The term skos:broader should be named with something less ambiguous than the
> single word "broader."
>
> Using just that single word is ambiguous, because statement "A
> skos:broader B"
> sounds like it means "A is broader than B" just as much (or more, in
> fact) than
> it sounds like it means "A has broader term B."
>
> Using just the single work seems extremely likely to be error-prone, as
> people
> reading or writing SKOS data (and/or tools) to struggle to remember whether
> skos:broader is defined to mean the former or to mean the latter.
>
>
> The name should contain something that indicates the direction of the
> relationship (the way "subclassOf" uses the word "of," or something like
> "hasPart" uses the word "has).

Actually I think this was a regrettable mistake in RDFS. We really 
should have used the names "superProperty" and "superClass" for those 
relationships.

The 1st RDF spec said
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/

Note: The direction of the arrow is important. The arc always starts at 
the subject and points to the object of the statement. The simple 
diagram above may also be read "http://www.w3.org/Home/Lassila has 
creator Ora Lassila", or in general "<subject> HAS <predicate> <object>".


This pattern is pretty common in RDF. We write "age", not "hasAge" 
usually. I don't find it works very well to pack short sentences into 
property names.

But that said, I agree that "broader" takes a bit more thought than 
other properties. I think this is because it is a property whose range 
and domain are the same. "parent", "sibling" etc are similar in that regard.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Tuesday, 7 April 2009 21:48:30 UTC