Re: SKOS proposal - labels and notes

Hi Dan, all,


> 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).
>


Mapping prefLabel to schema:name seems alright, and if introducing as a sub-property sound very right too.

Actually the fact that schema:name is expected to be unique for a language is important. If it's not, then I'd be tempted to push further its specialization by prefLabel (and altLabel too?) to keep the pref/alt distinction.

It's true I've talked for the perspective of a data publisher: if the data is there and lost when published in schema.org, it's a bit a pity per se. But what I had in mind was also the data consumer side of things. It seems to me that in the web context people would expect not to have a plethora of possible names to choose from without further guidance. E.g. if they want to create some visualization as an HTML page, with an HTML title that must be unique...
To sum up, it seems to me that the pref/alt distinction match quite well both data supply and data demand. I have to admit that it's largely a gut feeling, though :-)

Cheers,

Antoine

Received on Monday, 21 October 2013 20:42:32 UTC