Re: [tm-pubsubj] Vocabulary: will we get rid of "PSI" or not?

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

Murray

> I think the concept of a PSI is very valuable (hence my involvement in this TC),
> and the idea of using a URI as an identifier of a subject is to me the best
> way imaginable to provide this functionality. I can certainly see the difficulties,
> but that's what I think the Pubsubj TC is going to address. If we can remove
> some of the ambiguities and provide recommendations for best practices, we'll
> have a "technology" suitable for using in other communities (and I'm thinking
> specifically of the CG, KIF, RDF/DAML+OIL communities, as well as others related).

We are tuned on that. We are working towards providing something relevant for any
"semantic web" technologies.
<snip> All the points you agree upon, I am glad of your agreement </snip>

> The result of a database query may be a resource describing
> a subject, and that resource may be a document (in any format or notation), a
> resource within a document), or perhaps even something else. I'm considering
> (in the work with PORT) the idea that a small area of a Peircean manuscript as
> displayed from a TIFF image may be a useful and important subject, and with a
> suitable tool, could be an addressable subject.

You are certainly right, although I'm always uneasy with having one of those weird
interminable data base query strings under <subjectIndicatorRef> but it is maybe because I
am not familiar enough with data bases, so I am basically not trusting that kind of query
string to be a stable identifier. I'm certainly wrong here, but you only trust what you
know, basically. After all, is not an URL a kind of query string on the Web data base?

>I think we all must accept that the world is continually changing.
> With my move to England I'll be dismantling (actually just not paying the bill)
> my doctypes.org web site.

That's a pity. Do you have an alternative home for its content?

> With this in mind we can only ask authors/publishers to do what they are able
> to declare subject indicators that are "likely" to be stable. And to maintain
> their topic maps, checking for broken links, etc. We can't entirely escape
> the problems of the web, or the world. The only way would be to not connect
> with the web or the world, by using URNs, by not interconnecting our topic maps
> to the rest of that changing, addressable space. I don't think anyone would
> suggest that here.

Nope. We have to deal with this everchanging world. That's life ...

> But for example, I contacted Doug Lenat and asked him how stable the Cyc HTML
> pages were as URLs, and he said that they had no plans to change them, and
> that the next version of Cyc beyond 2.1 would use a different set of web
> pages. You can often tell by the URL if it's dated or versioned, and then it's
> a matter of whether or not older versions will stay online. But if Cyc changed
> its name, merged with Enron, or ended operations, well, yes, these subject
> indicators would have no documentation. They'd still be suitable subject
> indicators, but would have no addressable resource as documentation. It behooves
> me as a PSI author/publisher to make sure any client of mine using my Cyc topic
> maps has a local (eg. CD-ROM) copy of the Cyc documentation (for example).

When you set a reference geographic beacon, you've better seal it in solid mountain rock,
but you are not sheltered from continent's drift. Even "fixed" stars are drifting ...
that's why you need dating and versioning your maps.

> > "A Published Subject Indicator is a Subject Definition Resource used as a Subject
Indicator"

> I get your point but as written it almost sounds like a tautology.

It is one only if you merge publisher's and author's viewpoint. That you can do because
you are both :))

Bernard