SKOS/Issues/ConceptEvolution

The problem

Representing temporal evolutions of concept schemes and their content. Versioning.

Relevant work

Focused on KOSs:

• SKOS Core Guide (2004-2005) Section: Versioning and Change Management http://esw.w3.org/SkosCoreGuideToc/SectionVersioning

• Extending the simple knowledge organization system for concept management in vocabulary development applications. Joseph T. Tennis, Stuart A. Sutton. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/116332034/HTMLSTART (see also "Previous discussions" section below)

• Use cases defining an implementation of the above paper in the NSDL/Open Metadata Registry
  • http://wiki.metadataregistry.org/SKOS_Concept_History_Management
  • http://wiki.metadataregistry.org/Versioning

• "A Metadata Registry from Vocabularies UP: The NSDL Registry Project". Diane I. Hillmann, Stuart A. Sutton, Jon Phipps, Ryan Laundry, Dublin Core 2006, http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.DL/0605111 has a discussion of versioning SKOS vocabularies on page 4.

• Implementation example of the above in the Metadata Registry
  • http://metadataregistry.org/uri/NSDLEdLvl.rdf
  • http://metadataregistry.org/uri/NSDLEdLvl/ts/20080507101948.rdf
  • http://metadataregistry.org/uri/NSDLEdLvl/version/release+1.0.rdf

• DDC, SKOS, and Linked Data on the Web. Michael Panzer. http://www.oclc.org/news/events/presentations/2008/ISKO/20080805-deweyskos-panzer.ppt http://dewey.info/

• Slides on change management in Identifying management issues in networked KOS: examples from classification schemes. Aida Slavic, Antoine Isaac. http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/research/hypermedia/nkos/nkos2009/programme.html

• Correspondence between ISO 25964 and SKOS/SKOS-XL Models. Technical report, National Information Standards Organization, 2012. Available from: http://www.niso.org/schemas/iso25964/correspondencesSKOS/

• Case study: "Constantly Under Construction - STW Thesaurus for Economics Linked Data Maintenance", by Joachim Neubert (Slides from DC Libraries Community 2013) http://dcevents.dublincore.org/IntConf/dc-2013/paper/view/152/168

• Two blog posts by Pete Johnston: 1, 2

• skos-history: Ontology and processing practices for versions of SKOS vocabularies (Project on GitHub)

• Case study: "Leveraging SKOS to trace the overhaul of the STW Thesaurus for Economics" by Joachim Neubert, applying the skos-history methods (DC-2015 paper)

In more general context:

• Versioning (UK Government) Linked Data. Jeni Tennison. http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/141

• OWL versioning
  • http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-owl2-syntax-20091027/#Ontology_Annotations (OWL 2)
  • http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-owl2-syntax-20091027/#Ontology_Documents (OWL 2)
  • http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#VersionInformation (OWL 1)

• Papers by Michel Klein http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mcaklein/papers/older/ and Natasha Noy ...

• The Changeset ontology defines a set of terms for describing changes to resource descriptions http://vocab.org/changeset/schema.html

• http://www.ontologydynamics.org for the ontology dynamics community (and workshops)

• Biological taxonomy services by NamesforLife, including time aspects. http://services.namesforlife.com

• ISO 19135:2005 Geographic information -- Procedures for item registration
  • a generic model for registration (publication) of items in 'registers'
  • includes workflows for modification of registers, and identifies key parties involved in the registration process
  • formalized in a UML profile that is close to RDF

• With a focus on tracking changes for mapping update: Sini Pessala et al. “MUTU: An Analysis Tool for Maintaining a System of Hierarchically Linked Ontologies.” (ISWC 2011) http://www.seco.tkk.fi/publications/2011/pessala-et-al-mutu-2011.pdf

Previous discussions

• "Modeling change in and between schemes using SKOS - the problem of persistent URIs", public-esw-thes, August 2006 http://markmail.org/thread/o6mfnrzatawebkek
• "Revisions and changes in SKOS", public-esw-thes, September 2008 http://markmail.org/thread/asun6mi7c6m2y6ef
• "Status of SKOS resources (stable, testing etc) : supersededBy ???" June-July 2010 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2010Jul/0002.html
• "SKOS, owl:sameAs and DBpedia" March 2010 http://markmail.org/message/eo7nmtjuaifmxgnj
• SKOS and the ontogenesis of vocabularies - Joseph Tennis, DC 2005 ttp://dcpapers.dublincore.org/pubs/article/view/832

Related Issues

• Linking SKOS concepts to other representations of the same referent. See foaf:focus. Different versions of a concept have the same focus, either across different concept schemes, or across different versions of the "same" concept scheme.

People interested in this issue

Bernard Vatant, Antoine Isaac, Joachim Neubert, Hacene Cherfi, Charles Teissèdre, Lise Rozat, Jon Phipps, Simon Cox, Vladimir Alexiev, Eugeniu Costetchi