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Subject: Re: PMTM4 templates vs. TMCL (was: Re: [topicmaps-comment] RE: OASISvs W3C)
[Steven R. Newcomb] > True enlightenment is to fully grasp and enjoy both > perspectives simultaneously. *Both* perspectives are > *essential*. Absolutely. To put it another way, topics are necessary to have something to talk about, asssertions/associations are necessary to say anything about them. Just look at a Conceptual Graph (there I go again!) repesentation of any sentence. It's all associations and concepts (i.e., topics). > The question, "Are topic maps about > topics, or are they about assertions about topics?" is > really a waste of time and energy. Which brings me to > my dark suspicion. > [...] > All the same, it's very clear, at least to me, that we > must support the assertion-centric perspective before > we can support the topic-centric perspective. > We should concentrate on being able to say what we want about our topics. That is the association-centric part. At the same time, we have to establish the universe of discourse. That is the topic/taxonomy/ontology part (notice that this is more than just topics per se). > PMTM4 shows how Topic Maps eats its own dog food. So > far, I don't believe anything else that has been > proposed truly does. I'm open to the possibility that > another model can also do this trick. I'll certainly > resist the adoption of any model that doesn't eat the > dog food. If nothing else, PMTM4 demonstrates that the > dog food can be eaten. > Yes, but this does not rule out having a schema model, for example, that extends what is already in topic maps. The extensions become part of the dog food. In CGs, a conceptual graph can only have conceptual relations that have their attached concepts. But a conceptual relation is defined with slots or roles that are to be filled with concepts when instantiated. To properly describe this, you need to introduce formal parameters (or lambda expressions). I'd suggest that we will ultimately need formal parameters in topic maps, because otherwise we can't really define new associations properly. The reason is that we want the definitions or templates to be the equivalent of classes rather than instantiated objects. So we cannot refer to any specific instance in a template, and thus we need formal parameters to represent any and all instances. With formal parameters you ***would*** be able to use a topic map to define any new association or constraint you wanted to. Without them, I'm not at all sure you really can. Cheers, Tom P
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