Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

March 18, 2014

Aligning Controlled Vocabularies

Filed under: MARC,SKOS — Patrick Durusau @ 7:32 pm

Tutorial on the use of SILK for aligning controlled vocabularies

From the post:

A tutorial on the use of SILK has been published.The SILK framework is a tool for discovering relationships between data items within different Linked Data sources.This tutorial explains how SILK can be used to discover links between concepts in controlled vocabularies.

Example used in this Tutorial

The tutorial uses an example where SILK is used to create a mapping between the Named Authority Lists (NALs) of the Publications Office of the EU and the MARC countries list of the US Library of Congress. Both controlled vocabularies (NALs & MARC Countries list) use URIs to identify countires, compare for example, the following URIs for the country of Luxembourg

SILK represents mappings between NALs using the SKOS language (skos:exactMatch). In the case of the URIs for Luxembourg this is expressed as N-Triples:

The tutorial is here.

If you bother to look up the documentation on skos:exactMatch:

The property skos:exactMatch is used to link two concepts, indicating a high degree of confidence that the concepts can be used interchangeably across a wide range of information retrieval applications. skos:exactMatch is a transitive property, and is a sub-property of skos:closeMatch.

Are you happy with “…a high degree of confidence that the concepts can be used interchangeably across a wide range of information retrieval applications?”

I’m not really sure what that means?

Not to mention that if 97% of the people in a geographic region want a new government, some will say it can join a new country, but if the United States disagrees (for reasons best known to itself), then the will of 97% of the people is a violation of international law.

What? Too much democracy? I didn’t know that was a violation of international law.

If SKOS statements had some content, properties I suppose, along with authorship (and properties there as well), you could make an argument for skos:exactMatch being useful.

So far as I can see, it is not even a skos:closeMatch to “useful.”

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress