Re: Fwd: Re: Primitive roles.

Teresa Silio wrote:
> What I think is that if it is possible to descibe a text using only a
> set of primitive roles, then it should be possible to describe a set
> of texts indexed by topic maps using the same primitives roles.
>
> Once you have an Action, an Agent, a Pacient or an Objetc, the roles
> are defined 'per se', you don't need to set out who is the buyer, as
> there is an action and an agent. You may define roles in a
> standarized way:
>
> Action: buy Agent: buyer Object: what was bought
>
> You won't need to create a role for 'buyer' another one for the thing
> that was bought and so on. You just need to define an action, and
> then set out which is the agent, and which is the object. This means
> you save roles, labels and extra metainformation.
Sure, it is very feasible, but of course your choice of the roles 
depends on the source material and what you want to do or say.  Since 
thematic roles are closely linked to natural language, they seem natural 
for analyzing a series of texts.
Murray didn't say so just now, but he has created a set of subject 
indicators for a more-or-less standard collection of thematic roles. 
I'm not sure whether he considers them to be publicly released at the 
moment, but  perhaps he would comment.
Cheers,

Tom P