Re-using and labelling other people's terms

Hi,

A project I'm working on has produced a concept scheme of classes and 
properties. I'm now encoding this as an RDF Schema, which is easy for 
the terms we're minting, but I'm getting in a twist about terms defined 
elsewhere. Rather than use owl:sameAs etc. I want to use the actual 
'foreign' property.

Context: ADMS is a vocab for describing data catalogues, being developed 
under the EU's ISA Programme [1].

DCAT is the widely used vocab for this sort of thing so we're using a 
lot of terms from there as well as from DC and FOAF.

So here's my question: ADMS has a class 'Asset' that is semantically 
identical to DCAT's 'Dataset'. What's the best property to use to add a 
lexical label of "ADMS Asset" to the existing term dcat:Dataset ?

I see several possibilities:

A) just use rdfs:label. This is potentially bad since a triple store 
with both DCAT and ADMS schemata would have multiple rdfs:labels for the 
same thing. That's legal, but possibly unhelpful.

B) use skos:prefLabel. In the context of ADMS, it /is/ the preferred 
label but, well, it seems a little rude to use this?

C) use skos:altLabel. This is probably safest since one can argue that 
'ADMS Asset' is indeed an alternative label for dcat:Dataset, but it 
seems odd to use altLabel (only) in a schema of any kind.

D) define a specific term for "we know it's called foo in the original 
but here we call it bar." Who would know to look for it? :-(

E) get over myself and use owl:sameAs to assert the adms:Asset and 
dcat:Dataset are the same.

I'm tending towards C or possibly A at the moment but it doesn't feel 
right.

Any advice please?

Thanks

Phil.


[1] 
http://www.semic.eu/semic/view/documents/2011-11-15_ADMS_draft_specification.pdf

-- 


Phil Archer
W3C eGovernment
http://www.w3.org/egov/

http://philarcher.org
@philarcher1

Received on Friday, 25 November 2011 15:42:58 UTC