Broader and narrower in Vocab

[Tony Linde]

Broader / narrower (b/n) might be said to simply be an indicator of the
direction of a relationship between two terms; it does not define the
relationship type. So the b/n relationship cosmology / cosmicBackground is
that of a 'subject area includes topic' relationship, Galaxy / seyfertGalaxy
is a 'type includes subtypes' relationship, and solarSystem / planet is a
'has component or part' relationship. 
 
It would seem that a solution to the b/n conflict would be to allow a
concept to belong to more than one broader concept, but this is not, AFAIK,
possible in SKOS. I suspect we have to choose one of the following options:
 
1. Accept that we must have many-to-many b/n relationships and so cannot use
SKOS to record the IVOA vocabularies: use some sort of ontology format
(OWL?).
 
2. Accept the above but use SKOS to record the concepts and decide (majority
vote?) to place each concept under the parent concept people would be most
likely to search on.
[2a. Perhaps as a parallel activity (if someone wants to undertake it), an
ontology is created whereby each term in the ontology is the URI of each
SKOS concept and all the relationships are recorded. This would enable both
simple (SKOS-based) and complex (ontology-based) search engines to be
trialled.]
 
3. Accept that it would take too long to agree on which type to use for each
b/n relationship and only define the concepts in the SKOS-based IVOA
vocabulary.
 
Comments?
 
Cheers,
Tony.
 
-- 
Tony Linde
Phone:  +44 (0)116 223 1292    Mobile: +44 (0)785 298 8840
Email:  Tony.Linde at leicester.ac.uk
Web:    http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~ael
 
Project Manager, EuroVO VOTech   http://eurovotech.org 
Programme Manager, AstroGrid     http://www.astrogrid.org 
Chair, JISC U&I Workgroup        http://tinyurl.com/ymxvqw
 
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