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Subject: [tm-pubsubj-comment] ISSUE 4 - Relationships between subjects
Bernard wrote (in http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tm-pubsubj/docs/recommendations/issues.htm): >-- Do the relationships between subjects, e.g. class/subclass, >belong to each PSI? > >-- Or should they be declared outside individual PSIs, in the >general PS Doc structure? > >-- Should they be declared at all? > >Proposal: > >When relationships with other subjects are inherent to the >definition of a subject (ex: taxonomy, thesaurus) they should >be declared inside each individual Subject Indicator. > >In other cases, the relationships should not belong to the PS >Doc itself, but the PS Doc could reference resources (e.g. >topic maps) using such relationships. It seems to me that this is really only a problem when PSI sets are being published in some machine processable knowledge representation like topic maps (or RDF). The reason for using such a representation would be to enable re-use through merging, querying, or other forms of automated processing. When that is the case, publishers should be encouraged to only make formal assertions that are strictly necessary (e.g., assigning base names). The more assertions they make, the greater the likelihood that other people will find those assertions either uninteresting, controversial, or downright wrong, and the less likely those people will be to use the PSI set for automated processing. However, when the PSI is simply a piece of text that only humans can interpret, assertions that help provide an unambiguous indication of the subject will simply be used to help the user decide whether or not that subject is the one they are interested in. For example, the following two definitions (taken from encyclopedia.com) contain assertions that are necessary in order to disambiguate the two subjects called "Alexandre Dumas": Dumas, Alexandre, known as Dumas père, 1802-70, French novelist and dramatist. Dumas, Alexandre, known as Dumas fils, 1824-95, French dramatist and novelist, illegitimate son of Dumas Père. In addition to base name assertions, these contain alternative base names, dates of birth and death, nationality, profession and even parentage: all of them assertions about the subject. Now, we might have inside information that Dumas fils was actually the son of Louis Bonaparte(!), but that wouldn't prevent us from using a PSI like the one above. Clearly, discouraging these kinds of assertions would be wrong. So, my proposal is that we encourage informal assertions that help indicate the subject and (to the extent that we even talk about publishing PSI sets in a machine processable knowledge representation) we discourage unnecessary formal assertions. Steve -- Steve Pepper, Chief Executive Officer <pepper@ontopia.net> Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34/WG3 Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps) Ontopia AS, Waldemar Thranes gt. 98, N-0175 Oslo, Norway. http://www.ontopia.net/ phone: +47-23233080 GSM: +47-90827246
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