Murray,
Murray Altheim wrote:
Thomas B. Passin wrote:
<snip>
My take on this is that a TM association should not be compared to a
single RDF triple. Instead, a TM association is almost exactly like
an RDF bnode that has a number of triples hanging off it. Well, it
does not _have_ to be a bnode (anonymous node), it could have an
identifier, but typically it wouldn't have one, just like most
associations don't seem to have universal identifiers.
Seems pretty reasonable to me.
The only real difference is that in RDF, the bnode is a Resource, just
like all the other nodes. However, if we regard an association as a
specialized variety of topic, the two cases are nearly isomorphic.
And why not consider an association to be a specialized variant kind
of topic? Then you wouldn't have to create a topic to reify an
association, it would be its own topic already.
Actually, that road has been travelled. I think Steve Pepper
wrote a paper on everything being a Topic a few years ago. But
at this point, the TM paradigm wouldn't necessarily benefit
from this simplification, I'm certain the community wouldn't,
and my take on things is that it's far better to concentrate
on the existing semantics -- I mean, we have an ISO standard
behind us -- it's not like we should push for a change to that.
The first reference I could quickly find with "everything being a topic"
was:
2) Conformance of work done in the XTM specification group must be monitored
not to object in any sense to the fundamental concept of topic maps as given
by the ISO 13250 standard. By fundamental I mean:
- the core "philosophical" concepts like e.g. the relation between topics
and subjects, the idea of everything being a topic, the orthogonality of the
topic and occurrence layers and so on.
From: # "Dr. Heiko Beier" <heiko.beier-88XGdBy3zegMb+B85CZM8Q@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/topicmaps-comment/200104/msg00054.html
Curious as to why you don't think there is a benefit in this
"simplification"? (Which I think is already present in ISO 13250, but
obscured by later practice in particular syntaxes and proposed
processing models.)
I fail to see the advantage to the extra steps.
Hope you are having a great day!
Patrick
--
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
Patrick.Durusau-Axl5Fd8bLORg9hUCZPvPmw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!
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