Re: [tm-pubsubj-comment] RE: paradigmatic PSIs

[Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>]

Jim

First a technical request. Please let's stop replication of this thread on four lists +
private copies. This debate is about PSIs, so its natural forum is tm-pubsubj-comment, and
I assume people really interested in PSIs are subscribed to that list. If they are not,
they should ;-)

I would like to put some elements on the table that IMO tend to show that your position is
not sustainable any more against Steve's one, that I agree upon basically. Please believe
I feel quite arrogant here, knowing the accumulated experience and wisdom you have in
standards matters, that should push the relative freshman I am in those matters  to bow
with respect and retire :))

But - I generally don't like those Big Words - we are maybe in the middle of a paradigm
shift (said it) where the notion of PSI is bound to play a central role. I'll just put
together some signs.

-- Any document, regulation, standard, concept ... that is not somehow addressable through
the open Web is bound to be more and more confidential and eventually disappear to the
profit of whatever is addressable. To the question "What do you speak about?", the answer
is practically, and will be more and more: "See that URL". Both for humans and for
computers. And this is not specific to topic maps. Topic maps have simply identified and
now attempt to regulate a practice that has spread out as quickly as the Web. Because it
is so simple, so evident. RDF uses it, namespaces use it. Like them or not, namespaces are
here to stay, and widely be used, there again by both humans and machines. And there are
more and more people saying that non-resolvable namespaces are bad practice, and that
namespaces should resolve to some resource explaining to humans what they are about. So I
think we are bound to a convergence between namespaces and PSIs.

-- W3C Web Ontology Working Group - Requirements for Ontology Web Language
http://www.w3.org/TR/webont-req/#section-requirements
"Unambiguous term referencing with URIs :
Two terms in different ontologies must have distinct absolute identifiers (although they
may have identical relative identifiers). It must be possible to uniquely identify a term
in an ontology using a URI reference."

BTW see another message about a formal liaison kick-off
between W3C WebOnt and OASIS PubSubj.

-- OASIS Standards Registry initiative http://www.oasis-open.org/stdsreg/.
Among the objectives in the Charter:
"3. A recommendation for how standards registries, both current and
future, can be used together to allow common searching across the
registries hosted by various organizations."

I figure "searching" there means both human searching and engine searching - that's what
proposed standard metadata are about.
And I figure "hosted" mean "published on the Web"

-- Last point. Having the notion of "role" for example defined by a PSI is maybe pointless
if you consider only topic map applications. But if you look further to the big picture,
other applications (whatever semantic application you can imagine) should be able to
identify and disambiguate the concept of "role in topic maps" among other similar
concepts. Imagine that the Common Logic effort
http://cl.tamu.edu/minutes/stanford-minutes.html or some equivalent effort goes to the
point of setting a common logical or mathematical ground for KIF, Conceptual Graphs, RDF,
Topic Maps, UML ... How will one express that the concept of "role in topic maps" is
mapped to whatever expression in KIF or CG or RDF is we have not PSIs for all of them?

This is a real challenge, of which proliferation of standards is one aspect, and for which
PSIs will be critical tools. Interoperability is the general objective, although I agree
with you that interoperability of Opera with Nuclear Security does not make much sense.
But interoperability of topic maps with RDF and KIF and CG, interoperability of ontology
languages, interoperability of standard concepts and terms does make sense and is
critical. That's why I think we need those "paradigmatic" PSIs

In that context, I feel like concepts in ISO standards being not defined by PSIs being a
major issue. This is not specific to ISO 13250, but a general remark about ISO process.

Regards

Bernard