Re: ISSUE-135: Last Call Comment: rdfs:label

Hi Michael,

On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 06:28:38PM +0100, Michael Schneider wrote:
> Alistair Miles wrote:
> 
> >The Working Group thus propose to change the type of the SKOS
> >labelling properties to owl:AnnotationProperty, and *postpone* this
> >issue (indicating that it may merit further consideration in the
> >future). Can you live with this?
> 
> I think that closing this issue as /postponed/ does not make much sense. A future WG will have no real option to remove the connection from rdfs:Label without largely breaking backwards compatibility. So I suggest to close the issue as 
> resolved, eventually.
> 
> But my concern is more on the chosen design, not so much on whether there is a problem with OWL DL. It looks to me that SKOS generally provides for the different kinds of properties a small, shallow property hierarchy, having some SKOS property as their upper property. For example, there is the idea of "notes", and therefore there is a general property "skos:note", having all concrete kinds of SKOS notes below. This pretty well represents the notion of having "several kinds of SKOS notes, namely editorial notes (skos:editorialNote), change notes (skos:changeNote), etc. But for labels, there is no general SKOS label, but all concrete kinds of labels directly inherit from rdfs:label. This looks like a hack to me.

Well, the idea was indeed to have a shallow property hierarchy for
labeling properties, but as rdfs:label seemed a suitable property to
act as the general parent of other labeling properties, we thought it
better to re-use existing vocabulary rather than invent new, possibly
redundant, terms.

In the case of skos:note, there was no suitable term from another
vocabulary to act as a general note property, so we coined skos:note.

> 
> My proposal is to introduce a skos:label property, being a sub property of rdfs:label, and all concrete label properties are sub properties of skos:label. Semantically, nothing would be changed by this. In particular all current kinds of SKOS labels would still be rdfs:label's. But one then don't has to refer to RDFS labels, i.e. go outside of SKOS, if one wants to generally talk about labels in SKOS.
> 

I don't see what you gain by this. If rdfs:label and skos:label are
effectively equivalent, why not just use rdfs:label?

Btw others have suggested a general skos:label property, see e.g. [1],
but I'm still not clear on what the benefit would be.

In your original comment, you say "If no strong reasons talk against,
I suggest to /not/ have sub properties of rdfs:label." However if we
follow your suggestion we still end up with a sub-property of
rdfs:label.

Thanks,

Alistair

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008Jul/0404.html


> I think this change would better match the rest of the SKOS design. But this is just a suggestion. I wouldn't oppose if you deny this idea.
> 
> >Kind regards,
> >
> >	Sean Bechhofer
> >	Alistair Miles
> 
> Best regards,
> Michael
> 
> --
> Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
> FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe
> Abtl. Information Process Engineering (IPE)
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-- 
Alistair Miles
Senior Computing Officer
Image Bioinformatics Research Group
Department of Zoology
The Tinbergen Building
University of Oxford
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Oxford
OX1 3PS
United Kingdom
Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
Email: alistair.miles@zoo.ox.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1865 281993

Received on Tuesday, 9 December 2008 16:02:39 UTC