On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 2:39 PM, Karen Coyle <lists_at_kcoyle.net> wrote:
> To me, SKOS is used for a thesaurus or other list of terms, and is by
> necessity artificial and contextual.
Right, but that inherently means that it's something different. The
hole in the ground in Arizona isn't artificial or contextual. How we
think about it is.
Another sticky example would be broader terms/narrower terms. A
concept may or may not have these; people and things don't have these.
> I happen to think that "subjectness" is one of the more difficult things we
> will have to work with in creating a new data format, in particular a
> linked-data one. I have a hard time with FRBR's view of subjects as entities
> -- to me, subjectness is a relationship between things, not a characteristic
> of the things themselves. I'd be willing to say that any "resource" (in the
> RDF sense, that is anything you can identify) can be a subject of another
> resource. Having done that, I suppose you could do as FRBR/RDA has done and
> limit it to the entities it has defined, but as a relationship not an
> "is-ness".
>
Well, I think Simon Spero subscribes to this list, so it's only a
matter of time before the "reading a book about unicorns while wearing
a unicorn hat" [1] analogy pops up, but there is definitely a school
of thought (and apparently that school of thought was involved in the
making of SKOS) that feel like KOS exist in different plane than
reality [2].
The linked data community is currently quite divided about whether or
not there's a difference between "is-ness" and "about-ness" (the
NYTimes publishing of their personal names as SKOS certainly
kickstarted some of this)-- it's certainly much simpler on the surface
to say that "William Shakespeare as subject" is the exact same thing
as "William Shakespeare as human being", but there are longer term
effects of this that might need to be considered.
-Ross.
1. http://www.ibiblio.org/fred2.0/wordpress/?p=30
2. http://markmail.org/message/gcfbk5ilucu2c3bm
Received on Tue Apr 13 2010 - 15:06:33 EDT