Lifting EMMeT to OWL getting the most from SKOS

Abstract

SKOS and OWL are quite different but complimentary languages. SKOS is targeted at “cognitive” or “navigational” representations, that is, thesauri, controlled vocabularies, and the like. OWL is targeted at logical representations of conceptual knowledge. To a first approximation, SKOS vocabularies try to capture useful relations between concepts, whereas OWL ontologies aim to capture true relations between concepts. Now, of course, the true is sometimes useful and the useful often true, thus SKOS and OWL overlap to some degree. However, there are applications where we need to know true relations (e.g., generating multiple choice questions). Furthermore, SKOS relations are not precisely specified (by design). For example, many different ways of being useful can be covered by the same SKOS relation, but only one way of being useful is actually applicable to some application. In this paper, we present a case study of modifying a large, existing SKOS vocabulary partially into OWL. This lifting is motivated by an application (generating multiple choice questions) that requires more precision in the representation than SKOS alone supports.