Re: [xtm-wg] RE: topicRef to reference assocs as well as topics

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

Bernard Vatant wrote -
 >  ...
> That's why I maintain it should be good to have a notion of
> <associationSubject>, refering to a Topic S which is the "reason for"
> associating members Topics A, B, C ...
> When building the Map to begin with, that's the way the questions are set,
> at least that the way I set them, and my hunch is it's a quite widely
> shared path of mind.
> You are in some trading business. You got these Topics A,B,C ... the first
> ones you consider in your context, they are not sentences, they are basic
> object-like Topics such as people, companies, products, and basic concepts
> like price, stock, transport ... You see these Topics are somehow related.
> The Map constraints push you to exprime "how" they are related, and it
> seems in most of the cases you'll find there is a Topic S which is the core
> of this "how". Calling it <associationSubject> seems to me the most natural
> way to do that.

I almost agree but I think you are really talking about the type of an
association, not its subject.  Consider a (non-association) topic,
"oaktree-15".  Its subject is a particular tree in my front yard - the topic
is "about" that real tree.  On the other hand, the tree is an instance of the
concept "oaktree".  That is, the type of topic "oaktree-15" is the topic
"oaktree".  The type is different from the subject.

This should not get lost.  Of course, it could be expressed through an
association, just as type/subtype could be.  The ISO TM standard used identity
to point to a subject, type or types for the type/instance information, and
xtm calls this "instanceOf" - very appropriate.  xtm also lets an association
be an instanceOf, so I think this area is well covered.

Cheers,

Tom Passin


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