Re: RE: philosophical question about occurrences

At 12:03 20.02.2003 -0800, Ashish Mahabal wrote:
> As Murray and Steve point out, ALL occurrences have to be references.

Not references. Relationships. Not quite the same thing. Relationships
*can* be expressed using references, but they need not be.

> 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.

That is true. The topic/association layer can be used above multiple sets
of information, but then the occurrences (at least the external ones) will
be different.

Remember that occurrences can also take the form of relationships to
resources that are *inside* the topic map - so-called internal occurrences
- using <resourceData> rather than <resourceRef>.

> 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).

Not quite sure I understand what you mean by that, unless it relates to
what I just wrote about the occurrences being different when the topic map
is overlaid on a different set of resources.

Steve

--
Steve Pepper, Chief Executive Officer 
<pepper-76mms6M3oqTR7s880joybQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34/WG3  Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps)
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