ISSUE-182: Last Call Comment: Index Terms

[SWD Issue Tracker]

ISSUE-182: Last Call Comment: Index Terms

http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/182

Raised by: Sean Bechhofer
On product: SKOS

Raised by Michael Panzer [1]:


2. Index terms
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An important part of many classification systems is an index, in the
case of the DDC its "Relative Index". Index terms associated with a
given class generally reflect several of the topics falling within the
scope of that class. There is no easy way of modeling this relationship
in SKOS:

Class/Concept:
616 Diseases

Index terms:
   Clinical medicine
   Diseases--humans--medicine
   Illness--medicine
   Internal medicine
   Physical illness--medicine
   Sickness--medicine

Currently, a possible workaround is to construct the complete Relative
Index as a separate skos:ConceptScheme and relate the concepts in these
two independent schemes by using mapping relations:

skosclass:hasIndexTerm rdfs:subPropertyOf skos:closeMatch .

skosclass:isIndexTermOf rdfs:subPropertyOf skos:closeMatch ;
  owl:inverseOf skosclass:hasIndexTerm .

<class/616> a skos:Concept ;
  skosclass:hasIndexTerm <index/Clinical%20medicine> ;
  skos:inScheme <classification> .

<index/Clinical%20medicine> a skos:Concept ;
  skosclass:isIndexTermOf <class/616> ;
  skos:inScheme <index> .

This seems to be a satisfactory best-practice solution in this case, but
it has broader implications as index terms are just one instance of
Class-Topic Relations


[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2008Oct/0061.html