I have taken the liberty to move Nico's comments to a seperate page:
I am not too concerned about finding the perfect label at this point. As long as we recognize the following. There are
(1) "traditional relationships among names (!), i.e. names snynonymies as we see them in the literature, catalogues, most on-line databases, and so on. This is the "name world";
(2) somewhat vague relationships (of the type "?" in the moss work) among 2 poorly defined concepts, or among 1 poorly defined (e.g. "reference") concept and 1 better-defined (e.g. "original") concept. This is something like a transition of the name- to the concept world;
(3) relationships among 2 sufficiently well defined concepts within 1 and the same classification ("vertical" in my preferred terminology, these are easily read off the classificatory hierarchy, "concept world, case 1");
(4) relationships among 2 sufficiently well defined concepts pertaining to 2 independent classificatory systems ("lateral", this is where the expert understanding kicks in, "concept world, case 2").
I've left out here various issues, e.g. the idea that concepts are tied to vouchers, or that some concepts may be defined with both a lateral AND a vertical aspect, e.g. "Carya sec. A is congruent with Carya sec. B (lateral) BUT WITHOUT the child ovata sec. B ("latero-vertical")." As you know I think understanding the relationships is critical to understanding the concepts themselves.
I DO believe that the name/concept distinction in my points (1) vs. (2)-(4) is an important thing to capture in our terminology. Certainly the moss authors did that. The distinction of (2) vs. (3)-(4) represent the idea that not all concepts are (meant to be) precise enough to assign exact relationship symbols to them - also quite fundamental. The (3) vs. (4) distinction is also a simple yet power handle to understand what we're trying to do with the relationships.
So somewhat independent of the actual terms we come up with, I think our preferred terminology ought to capture when the relationships concern names vs. concepts, shallowness vs. a certain depth of meaning, and one or multiple classification schemes. Those are in my (current!) view the main "cognitive" handles we need to approach the task of dealing with the relationships. -- NicoFranz, VIII-31-2004
In response to Nico.
Do you have any concrete proposals about how we should classify relationships, whether we need to enumerate more relationships, and is there something lacking/that we cant capture by expressing a relationship between two concepts?
Please look at section 2.3 of the complemetary document in DraftStandardDocumentation where we have listed relationships and divided them into groups similar to yours.
There is a page to add/discuss new relationship types, TaxonConceptsRelationshipTypes.
We are already considering that we may need to add the ability to capture a sort of 'comment' relationship for single concepts, for example to capture the fact that a revision has considered and discounted an earlier concept. -- TrevorPaterson 01 Sep
In addition to Trevor's comments. I think 3) and 4) are sufficiently covered as explicit relationships (set operations or parent/child). (Traditional) Name relationships are difficult to interpret in a concept world. We have used the approach to have "nomenclatural" concepts that encompass all concepts that have used (or will use) a particular name. So the various types of name synonymy relationships are expressed as relationships between these 'special' concepts. --RobertKukla 1/9/04