Document use of skos label properties vs names for real world instances

[rjyounes]

Spun off from issue #425

I've been thinking about gist:name vs skos:prefLabel, and I've concluded that individuals that have real names in the real world should in general not have prefLabels, but rather names (though I don't rule out the possibility that labels would be appropriate in some contexts). Consider the lengthy discussion about how to format prefLabels in #227; you wouldn't have this discussion about the United Nations, because the name is an actual fact that has been assigned to the individual in the outside world, not something we assign. Instead of altLabel, one could define a hierarchy of name properties, such as abbreviation, acronym, legalName, genericName, givenName, familyName, etc. to provide other names like "UN," and so on. These tell you the semantics of the names and how they are used, as opposed to altLabel. I'm not proposing that all of these would be defined in gist itself - though abbreviation and acronym are universally useful, and legalName may be generally useful in an enterprise context.

[uscholdm]

@rjyounes
I advocate ONLY giving names to things via gist:name when in the real world it has a name. Special kinds of names, such as first, middle, last, legal etc can be subproperties of gist:name.

Because applications assume that prefLabels are present, there should always be prefLabels, even in some cases it is the same as the name.

[rjyounes]

I like @uscholdm's suggestion. Closing because this is a best practices issue rather than a gist issue.

[rjyounes]

I'll re-open it and change it to a style guide issue.