[humanmarkup-comment] RE: AW: [topicmaps-comment] multilingualthesaurus - language, scope, and topic naming constraint

[psp <beadmaster@ontologystream.com>]

I think that everyone, reading this, understands that most of the discussion
here is regarding the technical details of the Topic Maps standard and
related issues.

When one talks about thesaurus, and language scope, it is appropriate to
remind ourselves that the notion of language scope is one that has a common
understanding by individuals who are NOT working on the Topic Maps
standard - but who might be or who are just users.

These users are not interested in the various acronyms used here or the
technical meanings that the topic map community places on various words -
such as semantics.  What they are interested in, ultimately is whether or
not the promise of Topic Maps is being or can be achieved.

Whereas it is important to have a place to discuss these terms, perhaps it
is just as important to pause and reflect sometimes, on whether or not the
deep issues will resurface over and over again until somehow these deep
issues are truly recognized.


I am just reminding us, that the issue of what knowledge experience is, and
what the scope of the meaning of a term or topic is; can not stray so far
away from the common understanding so as to be unrecognizable.


I apologize that I have pursued this issue to much.  It is important to me
because I feel that a paradigm can be developed that would produce small
topic maps (perhaps better to call them topic graphs), where the scope
(defined in a natural way) of the topics as a small construct has a
definition at the last moment.

But the construction of only large topic structures and no easy-to-use
browsers seems to be all that I can see.  Perhaps someone is working on
something that can be shared?

One might ask for a browser that converts between a XML type string to a
GRAPH, and from a graph to an XML string, so that the XTM paradigm might be
studied as a knowledge technology.. as opposed to encyclopedic work?




-----Original Message-----
From: Steven R. Newcomb [mailto:srn@coolheads.com]
Sent: Saturday, February 02, 2002 8:08 PM
To: psp
Cc: Topicmaps-Comment; Humanmarkup-Comment; eventChemistry
Subject: Re: AW: [topicmaps-comment] multilingual thesaurus - language,
scope, and topic naming constraint


Paul Prueitt "psp" <beadmaster@ontologystream.com> writes:

> You are saying
>
> " We
>     believed that, if a topic is supposed to be
>     considered a member of a scope, then, by Golly, it
>     should appear inside the corresponding <scope>
>     element.  Otherwise, the syntax becomes
>     unlearnable, because it is too tricky."

> But this is not how the brain works.  And the brain
> is the only system that can do knowledge processing
> at this time.  Somehow the brain has a by-pass that
> avoids the very problem that you say prevents late
> binding of scope.

I'm baffled as to the relationship between what I was
talking about and whatever it is that you're talking
about.  I don't want your readers to think that I said
the things that you're saying I said.

I didn't say anything about the brain.  I did not
mention a problem that prevents late binding of scope,
since I don't know what "late binding of scope" means.
I did not use the phrase "late binding" at all.

I was talking about the XTM information interchange
representation, and saying that it was designed to be
as simple and intuitive as possible.  The person I was
responding to had suggested that the value of the
xml:lang attribute should be added to XTM and be
considered to specify a scoping topic, even though this
would make natural language topics the only class of
topics that would not appear in the normal way within
the content of the appropriate <scope> element.  I was
saying that I didn't think that this suggestion was a
good idea.  That's all.

-- Steve

Steven R. Newcomb, Consultant
srn@coolheads.com

voice: +1 972 359 8160
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