SV: [egov] Representing polyhierarchical taxonomies in XML

[Bjarne Heltved <BH@itst.dk>]

I think it would be a good idea to discuss this matter with people who have
more experiences with OWL, topic maps etc.

In Amsterdam in april (XML Europe 2004) I went to the Steve Pepper (from
Ontopia) presentation on topic maps
(http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html). It was impressive.
One of his conclusions about using OWL or topic maps was that it depend on
the task.

Last month I went to a workshop in Lund (Sweden) where one of the
presentations was about reengineering the AGROVOC thesaurus (FAO - Food and
Agriculture Organization) with about 30.000 terms into OWL! A thesaurus has
3 standard relationships between concepts - equivalence, hierarchical and
associative.

In OWL you can create more than 100 relationship types if you want to. In
the work with the AGROVOC-thesaurus they work with (only!?) 10 different
relationship types. You have to work/deal with the different relationship
types afterwards!

More complex systems does not mean better systems!   

I have to introduce another framework - SKOS Core.

SKOS Core is an RDF Scheme for representing thesauri and similar types of
knowledge organisation systems (KOS). SKOS Core is a basic framework for
building concept schemes and it is intended as a complement to OWL.

At the moment I don't know if it works with polyhierarchical taxonomies. You
can read more about SKOS Core 1.0 at
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/1.0/guide/

Regards
Bjarne

Bjarne Mollwitz Heltved
Informationsarkitekt, bibliotekar

IT Strategisk Kontor
IT- og Telestyrelsen

IT Strategic Center
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Ministry for Science, Technology and Development

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-----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
Fra: Martin Bryan [mailto:Martin.Bryan@csw.co.uk]
Sendt: 2. juli 2004 16:49
Til: 'Paul Spencer'; 'Ann Wrightson'
Cc: egov@lists.oasis-open.org
Emne: RE: [egov] Representing polyhierarchical taxonomies in XML


Paul

It's a thought, and one I'll bear in mind while I wait to hear if others
have a view. I know you were looking at DAML+OIL a while back. Is there a
reason you don't think that this is the best tool for the task? It is aimed
specifically at representing taxonomies.

The DAML+OIL work has been supersceded by the Web Ontology Language
(otherwise known as OWL, for those who understand their Winnie-the-Pooh).
The problem is that OWL is a much more complex structure than Topic Maps,
and until a decent range of tools is available is going to require experts
to maintain polyhierarchical taxonomies. Simple to use topic map tools are
already available, are understood by a wide range of people and are based on
concepts that can be taught in less than half an hour.

Martin Bryan

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