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When to use skos:Concept in FIBO

When to use skos:Concept in FIBO

Owned by Michael
Last updated: Nov 23, 2015

Background

This was spawned by JIRA issue:  FLT-52 - Use of SKOS Concepts in FIBO IN PROGRESS

There are two separate but related issues:

  1. How and when should skos:Concept be used in FIBO?
  2. How to represent concepts that are used to classify things, when you do not want to use owl:Class, and what criteria can be used to decide which approach to use.

This started when I thought one way to answer the first part of question 2 is to use skos:Concept. It was decided to not do that, instead, to use existing FIBO terms.

Below I summarize the discussion on the first issue.

Here is a discussion on the second issue above: When to use Classes vs. Classifiers.

Summary: skos:Concept

It was decided that we will not use skos:Concept for FIBO. There are various reasons.

  1. There is a separate effort to convert FIBO into a SKOS vocabulary. If we also used skos:Concept in FIBO proper, that would cause confusion. (Dean Allemang)

  2.  FIBO is about representing concepts, to start creating instances or subclassed of skos:Concept could suggest that some things in FIBO are concepts and some things are not. (Mike Bennett)

  3. skos:Concept is an extremely broad class that can be used in a large variety of ways. Thus, is is highly imprecise in its meaning. We chose instead to use a more precise concept. (Michael)

 

Instead we will either create classes directly in owl, or we will us the existing FIBO classification vocabulary: 

  • fibo-fnd-arr-cls:Classifier
  • fibo-fnd-rel:isClassifiedBy