Re: SKOS comment: name "broader" confusing

Daniel, Dan,

Well, I know that this is not the perfect solution, but I'd like to note that the orientation is at least made explicit in the rdfs:label of the skos:broader property, see the SKOS RDF vocabulary at [1] (the RDF file itself can be downloaded at [2])
A tool that would exploit the rdfs:label to render skos:broader statements for a human would therefore display "has broader concept".

Best,

Antoine

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/CR-skos-reference-20090317/skos.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core.rdf


> 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 22:00:29 UTC