Re: [xtm-wg] Nikita's comments

[Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@garshol.priv.no>]

* Daniel Rivers-Moore
|
| For me, rhw member element in the family association we are
| discussing meant "the players of the daughter role in this family".
| For you, it means "Astri, as player of the role daughter in this
| family"

That looks like a better interpretation of the semantics of reifying
the various constructs than the one I offered. If we intend to ever
have automated processing based on reification the semantics of
reification need to be specified. That does not necessarily belong in
XTM 1.0, though.
 
| I believe the correct way to say what you want to say is to create
| separate associations - in one of them, Astri plays the daughter
| role, and in the other, Silje plays the daughter role. They are not
| the same association. They are individual person-family
| relationships.

This may not be allowed by your topic map application. If the
application's schema says 'all family members must participate in the
same association' then this is not possible, and I consider that a
reasonable design choice.

| Does this help, or just further confuse?

It does help, since it considerably clarifies what really happens when
two members with the same type are merged. It also means that there
are two solutions to this problem:

 - allow <member>s to be merged, but require processors to map _both_
   IDs to the resulting <member>

 - disallow <member>s that will merge

The first solution has the disadvantage that if you load in your XTM
document, do some processing on it and write it back out again one of
the IDs will have been lost, and so any reification references are now
broken anyway.

So disallowing <member> merges still looks like the best solution.

| If you need a single association that brings together all the people
| that play the role of daughter, you can do that, but you'd better
| create a subject identifier, or at least a description occurrence,
| that makes clear to readers or other co-authors that this is what is
| intended,

To me this sounds like a hairy thing to do, and something that better
belong in a query. If you want to speak about the concept of being a
dauther, use the topic used to type daughter members. If you want to
find all daughters, use a query.

--Lars M.


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