Re: [xtm-wg] XTM-ISS Important XLink difference in DTDs

[Jack Park <jackpark@verticalnet.com>]

Comments below...

From: Dale Hunscher <dale@supportability.com>
<massive snippage/>
>I would like to second Graham's concern, or raise one of my own if I am not
> echoing his concern correctly. There is a feeling when reading all the
> material on topic Maps that it is a great benefit that everything is a
> topic, and on one level that is true. On another level, though, if
> everything is a topic, but there are many different flavors of topics,
> processing of topics will rightfully ignore their topic-ness and focus on
> their flavors. Sometimes it is better to have different entities for
> different purposes, even though they may *also* have some part of their
> nature in common.
>
Could we see a few examples of the concept of *flavor*? For instance,
consider the topic *library*.  I can use scopes to focus occurrences to
repositories of books, and I can also focus occurrences to program code.
Would those be *flavors* of the library topic?  How can I focus associations
linked with that topic?  Must I subclass (subtopic?) library to, say,
booklibrary and codelibrary?  Note that we often refer to DNA as a library.

Dale, I believe you have raised an important question; in particular,
importance rises when we begin to discuss using topic maps to represent
ontologies.  My experience building ontologies has shown that, given
database issues of duplicate names, we sometimes use *namespaces* to declare
what *scopes* appear to cover.  That way, we can have a literature
namespace, a software namespace, and a molecular biology namespace and still
use the word *library* and keep our links aligned.  It strikes me that if we
wish to satisfy the needs of ontologists, we must look at their ontology
while constructing ours.

> The looseness of the current approach may work well for corpora like
> encyclopedias where the material is fairly loosely structured and no
> significant liability issues are involved; however, for the kinds of
> repositories my clients deal with (e.g., pharmaceutical and legal
> information) precise specification of content and data type is important

What means *looseness*?

Cheers
Jack



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