Vocabularies: next steps

[Ed Shaya]

Norman Gray wrote:
>
> Ed, hello.
>
> On 2007 Nov 21, at 17:40, Ed Shaya wrote:
>
>> Norman Gray wrote:
>
>>> 1. The format of the concept labels (case and character set)
>> We need to decide just what this vocabulary will be used for.  If the 
>> terms are  to be used in ontologies, N3 statements,  UCDs, etc, then 
>> they need to be readable.  The set [a-z] only does not make a 
>> readable set.  The argument that these are just the Ids and no human 
>> will ever need to see them, is only true if the SKOS is not actually 
>> used.
>
> I'm not sure I follow you.  The maximally normalised format leaves the 
> terms with some mnemonic force for the benefit of that handful of 
> people who will deal with the term URIs directly.  Users will never 
> see the URIs, but only the prefLabels, which will be perfectly 
> human-readable.
I see a future in which there are many people involved in using URIs 
directly.  A shorthand version of URIs are needed for N3 statements and 
for Sparql query.  The preflabels will not work because of the spaces 
and unpermitted characters.  I expect that until we have pure natural 
language processing for queries, users will need to enter sparql 
directly.  So basically, you can't really protect users from the URIs.  
You could protect them from the URIs in the skos by creating a mapping 
between skos URIs and Ontology URIs, but I think most of us think it is 
a bit silly for the semantics working group to purposefully come up with 
two sets of URIs for every term and a mapping.
Since we are agreed that we will soon be creating an ontology, then lets 
make the skos URIs  useful for the ontology as well.

Ed