Re: [xtm-wg] The Nature of Things...

[Jack Park <jackpark@verticalnet.com>]

Chris, you raise valuable points.  Comments below...

From: Chris Angus <chris.angus@btinternet.com>

> Jack
>
<snip>
>
> I think that the trouble is that people have been finding it quite hard to
> model the 'easy' things well, so the idea of modelling the hard things can
> seem like too much of a challenge.
>
And, I always hoped that Topic Maps were going to bring more folks into the
modeling game.

<snip>
> When you start looking at other forms (e.g. non-Newtonian) of system then
> other things are coming into play, notably the interplay of the
metalanguage
> and object language levels and a greater need for handling abstract
> entities.
>
Here, I was thinking more in terms of the algebras of topological spaces.  I
cannot speak to the interplay involved between levels of languages. It has
occured to me that complex systems are not easily modeled with simple
logics; graphs of complex systems I have built in the past have proven
difficult to "tune" and validate. It seems possible that others may have had
different success in doing similar projects.

> It seems clear to me that topic maps have to have the ability to express
> things in the 'hard' domains as well as the domain that you describe as
> 'easy'.  But then we are not trying to come up with some all-encompassing
> data model for those domains.
>
> Chris Angus

I would argue that it is difficult to understand what it is that *we* are
trying to do.  All-encompassing data models?  I cannot imagine that use
case.  I can easily imagine topic maps used to catalog or otherwise describe
domains of interest anywhere on the web, but I cannot imagine topic maps
ever serving as the data model for all the web.  I do, however, suspect that
topic maps can be grounded in a data model that, itself, provides an
ontological grounding for the web.  I have been discussing such an idea on
the other topic maps list with Bernard Vatant and others. In fact, Bernard
has moved that discussion over to a web site:
http://www.quicktopic.com/4/H/iDrkiq6meKMpRbho5Z6j And, I believe that my
thinking here has some level of importance to the *public subjects*
discussed in the XTM specification. A somewhat brief statement on that is
that I suspect that public subjects -- semantic grounding for topics --
ultimately cannot be point sources; rather they are likely to be akin to
attractor basins, which form clouds around a concept space defined by
collaborative effort.  Topics themselves are subject to conceptual drift.
Given that view, I am inclined to repeat my thought that we ought to think
about modeling the hard stuff, but not in Version 1.0.

Jack Park


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