SKOS Concepts and Natural Language Concepts: an Analysis of Latent Relationships in KOSs

Kapidakis, Sarantos

SAGE

Μάστορα, Άννα (EL)

Πεπονάκης, Μανόλης (EL)

Peponakis, Manolis (EN)

Mastora, Anna (EN)

The vehicle to represent Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) in the environment of the Semantic Web and linked data is the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). SKOS provides a way to assign a URI to each concept, and this URI functions as a surrogate for the concept. This fact makes of main concern the need to clarify the URIs’ ontological meaning. The aim of this study is to investigate the relation between the ontological substance of KOS concepts and concepts revealed through the grammatical and syntactic formalisms of natural language. For this purpose, we examined the dividableness of concepts in specific KOSs (i.e. a thesaurus, a subject headings system and a classification scheme) by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques (i.e. morphosyntactic analysis) to the lexical representations (i.e. RDF literals) of SKOS concepts. The results of the comparative analysis reveal that, despite the use of multi-word units, thesauri tend to represent concepts in a way that can hardly be further divided conceptually, while Subject Headings and Classification Schemes – to a certain extent – comprise terms that can be decomposed into more conceptual constituents. Consequently, SKOS concepts deriving from thesauri are more likely to represent atomic conceptual units and thus be more appropriate tools for inference and reasoning. Since identifiers represent the meaning of a concept, complex concepts are neither the most appropriate nor the most efficient way of modelling a KOS for the Semantic Web. (EN)

Άρθρο σε επιστημονικό περιοδικό (EL)

Scientific journal article (EN)

Τεκμηρίωση (EL)

Επιστήμη ηλεκτρονικών υπολογιστών (EL)

Morphosyntactic analysis (EN)

Semantic web (EN)

Computer Science (EN)

Documentation (EN)

Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques (EN)

Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) (EN)

Atomic concepts (EN)

Relations (EN)

Composite concepts (EN)

Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) (EN)

Dividableness (EN)

Εθνικό Κέντρο Τεκμηρίωσης (ΕΚΤ)

Ιδρυματικό Αποθετήριο ΕΚΤ «Αριάδνη»

Εθνικό Κέντρο Τεκμηρίωσης και Ηλεκτρονικού Περιεχομένου (ΕΚΤ)

Επιστημονικές δημοσιεύσεις

Αγγλική γλώσσα

2016

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0165551516648108

17416485

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12776/15321

10.1177/0165551516648108

Journal of Information Science

© 2016 Anna Mastora, Manolis Peponakis, SarantosKapidakis

This is the accepted version of Author's manuscript. The final version published by SAGE is available at: Mastora A, Peponakis M, Kapidakis S. SKOS concepts and natural language concepts: An analysis of latent relationships in KOSs. Journal of Information Science. 2017;43(4):492-508. doi:10.1177/0165551516648108

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.el