The Notion of the “Concept Instance”: Problems in Modeling Concept Change in SKOS (Draft Discussion Paper)

Tennis, Joseph T. and Sutton, Stuart and Hillmann, Diane (2006) The Notion of the “Concept Instance”: Problems in Modeling Concept Change in SKOS (Draft Discussion Paper). In Proceedings International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, "Metadata for Knowledge and Learning" 2006, Manzanillo, Mexico.

Abstract

The U.S. National Science Foundation metadata registry under development for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is a repertory intended to manage both metadata schemes and schemas. The focus of this draft discussion paper is on the scheme side of the development work. In particular, the concern of the discussion paper is with issues around the creation of historical snapshots of concept changes and their encoding in SKOS. Through framing the problem as we see it, we hope to find an optimal solution to our need for a SKOS encoding of these snapshots. Since what we are seeking to model is concept change, it is necessary at the outset to make it clear that we are not talking about changes to a concept of such a nature that would require the declaration a new concept with its own URI.