Re: [SKOS] SKOS ontology sanity-check?

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 12:00:53PM +0100, Antoine Isaac wrote:
> >>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...

Okay - I will continue to assume this is not intended to be part
of the Recommendation package...

> >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.

Ah, interesting - I see that [1] does in fact have uppercase 
and lowercase _labels_.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-swbp-skos-core-spec-20051102/

> 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 ;-)

I could live with homogenizing to lowercase but would like to
hear more views about this -- first, about whether they should
be homogeneous or distinguish properties from classes, and if
homogeneous, then upper or lowercase.

> >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.

This is an interesting point! I'd really like to hear more
views. I'd have thought the problem would more likely be the
confusion of predicate and object -- as opposed to a confusion
between literal and non-literal objects.

Tom

-- 
Tom Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de>

Received on Thursday, 19 March 2009 11:57:00 UTC