Broader and narrower in Vocab

[Matthew Graham]

Hi,
>
> 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 is actually more fundamental than that: b/n belongs to 
abstraction/partition (is a/is a part of) categorization whereas 
cosmology/cosmicBackground is an example of function (is about) 
categorization which is associative rather than hierarchical.
>
> 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:
>
Semantic technologies have so far really focussed on partition 
categorization so as long as what you want to represent can be mapped 
into a hierarchy you can represent it in terms of SKOS, etc. However, 
I'm not really certain what the general technological solution for 
function categorization is.

Cheers,

Matthew