Singular vs Plural (Was: Re: Vocabularies: next steps

[Brian Thomas]

Hi Norman!

I'll reply to the other bit separately... (but yes, overall,. I agree..)

On Wednesday 21 November 2007, Norman Gray wrote:
> 2. The grammatical number of the concept names (singular or plural)
> 
> It seems that english-language thesauri `traditionally' have concepts  
> labelled with plurals, whereas French and German ones typically have  
> concepts labelled with singular terms.  

With all due respect, which thesaurus are you looking at? The one on my
shelf, "The Random House Thesaurus", published 1984, has only singular
terms for nouns (concepts). I did a quick 8 or 9 page random survey, then I started
looking for astronomical terms...all of the following appear singular:

star, planet, satellite, celestial body, galaxy, comet.

I also took a look at Roget's thesaurus online (http://thesaurus.com). Type in 'star'
and you get synonyms that you might expect. Type in 'stars' and you get
different information like "the stars and stripes". Try it again with 'galaxy'
and you are in good shape. Try it with 'galaxies' and you get no match.

So..I don't see an argument that things are generally in plural in thesauri, in fact, 
in English, it appears to be the opposite.

But nevertheless, the real issue is how singular/plural impacts the _use_ of the 
vocabulary. I feel that by  defining terms in the plural, we would be crippling any machine
use of the document (which is my understanding of its primary reason for being)
by 'building in' all concepts (nouns) a semantic statement that there are more than 
one. And if you do that, how do you label a single instance of a concept (for example,
for later use in ontologies, creation of individuals becomes difficult)? "Number of" 
semantics should be kept cleanly separate from the other concepts and applied 
only where needed. And I don't think plurals are really needed much for queries or
labeling stuff in things like tables. 

In terms of labeling a table, you are essentially describing a set of concepts and their 
properties in a 'compact' form. Each row is a concept (object/noun), and each column 
is a property. If the cell of the table has a scalar value such as a string/number, it maps 
to a datatype property, if there is a reference to another table, then its an object property.
I find it hard to imagine cases where items in the cell of the table describe plural things
(yes, it may happen, but its generally unlikely). Typically the mapping is one property value
per cell. So...if you make all concepts plural, then you are unable to label most cells of 
most tables (!).

Now consider a sparql query for 'all concepts which are stars':

select $s where { $s a <http://ivoa.net/vocab/star>. }

will find between 0 and near infinity number of possible star concepts. Lets
try another.."find all concepts which are stars which have coordinates" : 

PREFIX ivo: <http://ivoa.net/vocab>
describe $s where { $s a ivo:star . $s ivo:ra $ra .  $s ivo:dec $dec . }

Also is framed nicely in the singular.

Yes, the "human questions" which frame these queries have concepts in the 
plural, but the machine doesn't work in that fashion. These (machine) queries work, 
and make sense only in the singular, not the plural (e.g. you are
not demanding that any result set have more than one star, or that there be
more than one property of RA, DEC for each star) 

So, in summary, if the vocabulary/thesaurus is to be reused in machine applications 
such as Sparql query, the labeling of tables  or in ontologies then these terms should 
be in the singular, generally, except in rare/unusual cases (which I wont enumerate here).

> That's according to  ISO-5964.

The copy I found is "Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri"
which I checked out at : http://www.collectionscanada.ca/iso/tc46sc9/standard/5964e.htm#3.
I tried looking at this for insight, but a quick read didn't reveal any information germane to
the plural vs singular concept definition issue. Can you give a better pointer?

> I don't think it's a big deal, but the examples in the   
> SKOS docs are indeed either abstract nouns or plurals.
> 

Regards,

=brian