SkosDev/SkosCore/FundamentalFacets

This is a description of a requirement for guidance and/or support for modelling thesauri with 'fundamental facets' (also called 'fundamental categories') using RDF.

Requirement

Some thesauri organise their concept hierarchies at the highest level according to a set of 'fundamental facets', sometimes called 'fundamental categories'.

Take for example the AAT, which uses the following fundamental facets ...

Associated Concepts Facet
Physical Attributes Facet
Styles and Periods Facet
Agents Facet
Activities Facet
Materials Facet
Objects Facet

The design motivation is that each of these fundamental facets should be orthogonal ... i.e. no concept may be a member of more than one facet. However, this restiction may be broken in certain exceptional cases.

The SKOS-Core schema or the SKOS-Core documentation should provide clear support and guidance for how to model this type of structure, using RDF, RDFS, OWL and SKOS-Core.