eGov-Share CWA "Federated Terminological Resources"

One of the deliverables of the CEN/ISSS Workshop on eGov-Share (Discovery of and Access to eGovernment Resources) is a document titled "Part 2: Federated Terminological Resources" and a demonstrator application to address interoperability in the area of terminology.

In the proposed datamodel the term itself is the first class citizen. This deviates from current insights and approaches in thesaurus management and use, where the abstract concept is the first class citizen and the term is just a label of this concept.

This project decided to choose otherwise.

They use an XML format for describing the terms; an example.

<Term rdf:ID="Term_17">
   <name>City Council</name>
   <description xml:lang="en">This term represents a council of a city.</description>
   <language rdf:resource="#enus"/>
</Term>

<Term rdf:ID="Term_19">
   <name>Stadtverwaltung</name>
   <description xml:lang="de">Term repräsentiert die Stadtverwaltung.</description>
   <language rdf:resource="#dede"/>
   <relationship rdf:resource="#Synonym_2"/>
</Term>

<Synonym rdf:ID="Synonym_2">
   <destinationTerm rdf:resource="#Term_17">
</Synonym>

And offer an export facility towards SKOS and here it goes, according to me, completely wrong.

ex1:CityCouncil rdf:type skos:Concept;
  skos:prefLabel "City Council"@en;
  skos:inScheme ex1:referenceLocationScheme.

ex1:Stadtverwaltung rdf:type skos:Concept;
  skos:prefLabel "Stadtverwaltung"@de;
  skos:inScheme ex1:referenceLocationScheme.

ex1:CityCouncil skos:exactMatch ex1:Stadverwaltung.

So what is wrong?

Doing this directly in SKOS would bring us.

ex1:Concept_17 rdf:type skos:Concept;
  skos:prefLabel "City Council"@en;
  skos:prefLabel "Stadtverwaltung"@de;
  skos:inScheme ex1:referenceLocationScheme.

Being one concept having two preferred labels: one for english and one for german, instead of promoting the two terms to two different concepts.

One could argue that the two concepts are merged afterwards using "skos:exactMatch". BUT this is a complete misinterpretation of 'skos:exactMatch' which is a SKOS mapping property used to state mapping (alignment) links between concepts in different concept schemes. However, as you can see, the two merged concepts are in the same ConceptScheme "ex1:referenceLocationScheme".

What did get lost?

In the original CEN XML format the terms were first class citizens, entities with their own properties. In the SKOS above they are just demoted to plain strings. How do we promote them again using SKOS?

The SKOS vocabulary has been appended for this precise purpose with an optional extension for labels, SKOS-XL, which gives us following serialisation coming most closely to what was intended by CEN/ISSS WS/eGov-Share.

ex1:Concept_17 rdf:type skos:Concept;
skos:prefLabel ex1:Term1;
skos:prefLabel ex1:Term2;
skos:inScheme ex1:referenceLocationScheme.

ex1:Term1 rdf:type skos-xl:Label;
skos-xl:literalForm "City Council"@en;
ex1:description "This term represents a council of a city"@en.

ex2:Term2 rdf:type skos-xl:Label;
skos-xl:literalForm "Stadtverwaltung"@de;
ex1:description "Dieser Term repräsentiert die Stadtverwaltung"@de.

I cannot judge the other proposed output formats, but the SKOS part doesn't give me any confidence.