Re: [SKOS] SKOS ontology sanity-check?

Hi Tom,

Reacting on some of your points. Thanks for checking, btw! I had warned that I was hoping for feedback on many of these aspects...

>> Note I have *not* modified the DL version of the SKOS schema at [5].
> 
> I'm not clear on the intended status of the DL schema. Where is
> it linked from, if at all?

That's unclear to me as well. I think I discovered it by using the Protégé SKOS plug-in, which was using it at a time...

 
> Note that (most of) Dublin Core properties in
> the dct: (http://purl.org/dc/terms/) namespace
> have formal ranges, whereas for properties in dc:
> (http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/), range remains unspecified.
> 
> In particular, dct:contributor and dct:creator have the
> non-literal range dct:Agent [1], so one would expect the object
> to have a foaf:name or rdf:value.

Makes sense.
 

> Hmm - I had always assumed that the upper/lowercase
> convention applied only to the "names" of properties and
> classes -- the bits that are concatenated with the base
> URI of the namespace to form a URI for the property or
> class. It never occurred to me that this convention might
> extend as well to the human-readable labels, e.g. from
> http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/SKOS/reference/20090315/diff-skos.txt:
> 
>     <rdfs:label xml:lang="en">Concept</rdfs:label>
>     <rdfs:label xml:lang="en">is in scheme</rdfs:label>
> 
> I should think we would want the labels all to be consistently
> in uppercase or in lowercase (I'd vote for upper).

I also did not know about that neither, but Alistair mentioned it as a deciison criteria when he created the first labels.
I searched in existing ontology engineering guidelines, and found nothing conclusive about the natural language labels.

So in the end I took the decision of lower case for the properties as there are some verbs/article in them. But if you prefer homogenizing everything I will follow. (even though my feeling would have been to homogenize in the lower-case direction ;-)

 
> Hmm. To take two examples, foaf:name is defined as "A name for
> something" and dct:title is defined as "A name given to the
> resource -- they are defined in terms of their range, not in
> terms of what they do, e.g.: "Relates a resource to a name given
> to the resource". I see arguments both ways but think we should
> pause to consider whether we want to adopt, in effect, a new
> style for definitions.
> 

Note that for the datatype properties (or things that I could intuitively categorize as data properties, even if they are not formally defined as such, such as the various kind of skos:note) I kept to a wording similar to the one of dct:title and foaf:name, as I felt there was much less confusion possible. I changed the object properties as I felt they were more confusing. 
But again, this is a matter of personal feeling, for the moment.

Antoine

Received on Thursday, 19 March 2009 11:01:32 UTC