Re: [xtm-wg] parallel development of syntax and concept models

[Ben Darnell <ben@thoughtstream.org>]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2000 at 06:35:42PM -0600, Jim Farrugia wrote:
>          3) A link is, for lack of a better description, that which connects
>          two things.  The two things can be (topic, topic), which are
>          connected by a link called an association, or the two things can
>          be (topic, occurrence ?)  Is there a link that connects 
> occurrences with        occurrences?  If not a direct one, can this done 
> indirectly?
>          Does it make sense to link occurrence with occurrence?

When I said a topic links to things outside topic map space, the links
(or more specifically the things linked to) I was referring to are
called 'occurences' in the topic map literature.  

Topic maps do not define a link from occurence to occurence because
occurences by definition are outside the topic map domain.  (although if
a topic has two occurences, this is in a sense a link between those two
occurences).  Note that if two occurences are HTML documents, they can
contain links to each other using standard HTML methods, but this is
beyond the scope of TM.

> 
>          4) According to what Ben said above, it seems accurate to speak
>          of a topic (possibly) "having" two kinds of links: a link to 
> another topic
>          inside the Topic Maps space (that is, an association), or a link from
>          a topic (inside the Topic Map space) to something, not a topic, that
>          lives outside the Topic Maps space.  It seems that this other end
>          of this second kind of link is an occurrence, since the standard says
>          at one point, "Occurrences are the anchors of the topic link."

Right.  BTW, my app, ThoughtStream, uses a different model which I
developed independantly of topic maps in which a distinction is not made
between links within ThoughtStream and links to the outside world (well,
a distinction must be made on some level, but conceptually the two types
of links are the same, unlike the occurence/association split)

I'll leave the rest of your questions alone, since I'm a relative newbie
here.

-Ben

-- 
Ben Darnell              ben@thoughtstream.org
http://thoughtstream.org
Finger bgdarnel@debian.org for PGP/GPG key 1024D/1F06E509


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