RE: philosophical question about occurrences

Hi,

As Murray and Steve point out, ALL occurrences have to be references. The
way I look at it (and come to the above conclusion) is that the Topic Map
exists as a layer above an information pool (resources) and can be viewed
separately as a standalone document, and can, in principle, be overlayed
over another information pool and yet be mostly meaningful.

Would the above line of thinking be correct in the context of occurrences?
(The small doubt that I have is that the occurrences in the original Topic
Map could be now missing in the new infopool we are using).

I hope this is not a tangential question and I would like to be
enlightened on it.

Cheers,
ashish mahabal