This is exactly the point I've been making for over a year now
regarding use of SKOS in biomedical ontology development, and it is
why we use SKOS:prefLabel for all classes in BIRNLex (as well as
having the redundant rdfs:label for interoperability purposes). The
"altLabel" provides a means not only to associate lexical variants
but ultimately to create "namespace qualified" term sets or "views"
of a single ontology with the terms tailored to the needs of a
specific community. There would need to be an expansion of
annotation support in OWL to fully implement this, but SKOS can
provide a means to standard that method in the lexical domain, once
the required annotation capabilities have been added to OWL.
SKOS is not perfect and is still a work-in-progress, but my sense
from my experience in the life science literature database/library
science community is SKOS has made an excellent effort to incorporate
many of the lessons learned by that community over the last 30 years
- and "prefLabel" is one of them. It's also being moved forward
rapidly via its association with the W3C SWeb Best Practices and
Deployment WG and recently published a compendium of Use Cases they
started collecting last winter, amongst which are many life science
examples (thanks to the participation of Daniel Rubin from NCBO and
others).
Cheers,
Bill
On May 27, 2007, at 12:59 PM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
In think in the short term, in context of the HCLS demo, we can use
SPARUL rules to convert various forms of definitions and labels to
the usual rdfs:comment and rdfs:label. The only issue I see is that
there is a need for secondary labels (or conversely primary
labels), so we might want to borrow skos:prefLabel for cases where
we need this. Still, I would have that be redundant with rdfs:label.
Course there is a problem with, e.g. multiple synonyms - how does
one choose the rdfs:label to use in display if there are so many
that are not distinguished?
-Alan
On May 25, 2007, at 11:44 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I and some other people have already nagged Chris about the
representation of defintions and synonyms in the OWL versions of
OBO ontologies.
This is partly related to a larger problem, namely the
inhomogeneous representation of labels, descriptions and
definitions among biomedical Semantic Web ontologies. I have
started a Wiki page on this topic:
Bill Bug
Senior Research Analyst/Ontological Engineer
Laboratory for Bioimaging & Anatomical Informatics
www.neuroterrain.org
Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy
Drexel University College of Medicine
2900 Queen Lane
Philadelphia, PA 19129
215 991 8430 (ph)
610 457 0443 (mobile)
215 843 9367 (fax)
Please Note: I now have a new email - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
