Re: [xtm-wg] Suggested recommendations for Subject Indicators cho ice

[Jack Park <jackpark@verticalnet.com>]

I am most pleased that this topic of discussion came along.  As a brief
response, given that I could not be in Paris to partake of such an
interesting discussion, let me comment that it would seem a reasonable
contribution to the Web in general that XTM somehow become involved in the
creation and maintenance of an archive of public subjects -- a kind of
universal ontology, perhaps.

I tend to believe that concepts, themselves, are not best represented as
points in space.  A dictionary, for example, often has more than one
definition or usage for a given word.  Rather, I suspect that concepts are
akin to basins of attraction such that situation, context, past experience,
and so forth all play a role in the disambiguation of words we use.  Why
mention this in the context of an archive of public subjects?  Perhaps it is
because I suspect that such an archive will necessarily be a bit more
sophisticated than just URIs of named subjects.  How so? I have no idea.
Jack

From: Bernard Vatant <universimmedia@wanadoo.fr>

This is a point we unformally discussed in the Conceptual Model subgroup in
Paris, I put it down before it flies away.

The choice of Subject Indicators is at risk of two equally dangerous
extreme ways : "chaotic" or "unique thought".
The "chaotic way" : each TM author chooses its own definition of subjects,
its own glossary, its own resources, yielding a very colourful but somehow
unsharable Map. The "unique thought way" : every TM author references to
the same unique and universal ontology, such as Dewey Decimal
Classification, or Cyc Ontology, or Standard Uppper Ontology ...

To keep the middle way between these two extreme ones is needed to ensure
both stability, non ambiguity and sharability of TM.
It seems to me we could add somewhere in the spec some prose about that,
either in an Annex, or, as Murray suggested to me, in the "subject
indicator" paragraph. I wrote yesterday the following draft proposition. I
did not present it in plenary session because it was not really on the
agenda. I put it there for what it's worth :

Cheers

Bernard

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"Both conceptual model and syntax leave completely free and open the choice
of subjects and resources used to define subject indicators. Anyway,
non-addressable subjects are potential source of ambiguity. It's therefore
recommended that Topic Map authors choose, as far as possible, subject
indicators among stable public URIs or URLs found in any of the various
existing authoritative ontologies, indexes, thesauri, dictionaries ... to
ensure non-ambiguous, durable and sharable definition of subjects.
This recommendation aims only to suggest a way to make the subject
definitions as non-ambiguous, accurate and stable as possible, and does not
mean that anyone of such resources should be the unique reference source
for any « universal definition » of subjects."



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