Ont:+Vocab:

[Ed Shaya]

Why not add another element "pluralLabel" or just "plural"? 
Alternatively, one can add an attribute as in
<skos:altLabel number="plural" >Supernovae</skos:altLabel >. 
More information at virtually no cost. There is nothing sacrosanct about 
the SKOS attributes. 

Did anyone notice the new WD at the W3C "SKOS Reference" placed on Jan 
25, 2008?

http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/

It describes the OWL Ontology of SKOS.  At the end there is a section on 
extending SKOS, but it just has TODO for now.


Ed

Rob Seaman wrote:
> Alasdair J G Gray wrote:
>
>> The above is not quite true, it is all down to our usage. It is 
>> entirely possible to create a vocabulary that has separate concepts 
>> for the singular and plural versions of any given term. It has been 
>> an unwritten assumption that in this work we have been treating them 
>> as somehow "equivalent" and hence using altLabels.
>
> and
>
>> I agree with Ed that each term/concept in a vocabulary should contain 
>> just one preferred label and more importantly one definition. The 
>> whole point of this work is to be able to distinguish between the 
>> multiple meanings of terms.
>
> Well, if the only recourse provided is to include separate terms for 
> singular and plural, e.g., for SN and for SNe, then it is certainly 
> preferred to attach them as altLabels to the same concept.
>
> The flip side of distinguishing distinct meanings is to reliably NOT 
> distinguish variations of the same meaning...  However, I must still 
> believe that the librarians have some way not only of seeing that SN 
> and SNe refer to the same objects (well, subjects), but to go further 
> and perceive the difference in number expressed.  Dictionaries will 
> list the plural under the singular's heading, but do provide 
> information to tell the two apart.
>
> After all, the definition of "nose" is something like "that unique 
> thing on your face", while the definition (or, at least, crossword 
> clue) for "noses" might be "puntillitas for Hannibal".  Which is to 
> say that plural and singular point to distinct definitions in the 
> strictest interpretation.  I'm not arguing that we fuss about this - 
> but again, what is the SKOS commenting convention so that our 
> altLabels can be tuned to be responsive to our purposes?
>
>> Absolutely. There are no limits on the number of alternative labels. 
>> Of course, the applications that make use of the vocabularies will 
>> have to be wary that the same label can be used for different 
>> concepts and get the user to clarify which of the meanings they 
>> intended. This is why it is so important to have definitions for the 
>> terms as the application would only be able to display the labels 
>> back to the user if the definitions did not exist.
>
> Isn't displaying the labels precisely the point, though?  A user (or 
> other source) provides a token.  That token is not part of the 
> controlled vocabulary, but rather is a label.  The label is as likely 
> to be an altLabel as a prefLabel.  We can probably assure that the 
> prefLabels are mapped both surjectively and injectively (i.e., 
> "one-to-one correspondence" or "if and only if", etc.) onto the 
> controlled concepts, but we've convincing demonstrated that we'll 
> never arrange this for the altLabels.
>
> Thus there is a dialogue with the user, parroting not the altLabels 
> (and not the definitions), but rather the prefLabels for all matching 
> terms back for the user to select.  Perhaps the labels won't be 
> enough, in that case other information about the terms would be 
> available - but not just the definitions (short or long), but the 
> narrower and broader thans, etc.  I actually think the latter will be 
> of more utility than the former in further limiting the search.  "Do 
> you mean the "Milky Way" that is narrower than "candy bar", or rather 
> the "Milky Way" that is narrower than "spiral galaxy" that is narrower 
> than "galaxy"?
>
> (Which, of course, raises the question of denoting proper names, key 
> for the constellation vocabulary, among others :-)
>
> But the first scenario is surely to focus altLabels down to 
> prefLabels, right?  What else would the definition of "prefLabel" be?
>
> - Rob
>