Re: SKOS proposal - labels and notes

On 20 October 2013 17:30, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:
> On 10/20/13 7:25 AM, Antoine Isaac wrote:

>> Would this imply that the recommendation would be to have only one
>> schema:name, for the preferred label, and use altLabel and hiddenLabel
>> for variants? It may be conflicting with the possibility (already used?)
>> to have several schema:name for something.
>
>
> Hi, Antoine. Thanks for the detailed explication of this issue.
>
> As someone with a library background, I perhaps have a particularly strict
> interpretation of SKOS. In my field, thesauri exist in equal part to create
> a map of concepts and to control the terminology used for those concepts.
> This latter function is less common in today's web environments, where
> discovery is done on natural language, not controlled terms. Because there
> are still KOS systems that use controlled terms as concept identifiers, I
> would hate to see SKOS preflabel re-used in a less precise manner.
>
> I believe this supports maintaining a distinction between schema:name and
> skos:prefLabel, and not equating the two.

http://schema.org/name is currently defined as 'The name of the item.'
(you might argue it should say 'a name' not 'the name', but setting
that aside for now)

The way RDF and schema.org works, means that anything that is 'the
name of the item' is a legit value for this property. Are there any
values for a SKOS-like prefLabel that would not also count as 'a name
of' the item/concept? To the extent concepts have names at all, I'd
guess their preferred labels would all be names.

If not, i.e. if every preferred label of a concept is also a name, and
if we still want to maintain an explicit notion of 'preferred label',
then this seems a good candidate for describing as a sub-property /
super-property relationship. We've used that notion already in the
Action design, to relate focussed action-type-specific properties to
the broader, vaguer properties on http://schema.org/Action. It might
help here too (even though schema.org term navigation doesn't offer
any support for sub-property links yet).

Dan

Received on Sunday, 20 October 2013 22:33:36 UTC