Re: [xtm-wg] Topic Naming Constraint question

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

The question of whether these two acronym expansions are "really" the same or
not is actually one that even a human might not be able to answer.  It would
depend on the person's related knowledge.  How then could you get a script to
do so?  I agree with those other posts that dislike using scoping to try to
resolve it, and so I conclude that partial machine solutions must be sought.

There are two related problems.

1) In Lar's example, the two topics have two basenames each.  The script could
require a match on all basenames before automatically merging the topics.  It
would then create a list of topics that had partial matches (i.e., one out of
two, or one topic had only one basename while the other had two).  A human
would have to look at the list and decide in each case what to do.

2) The harder case in when there is only one basename for each topic, the
names match, perhaps all the other indicators for merging match too, but in
reality they should  be separate topics.  This situation would call for a
human decision, but how could the script know that?  It can't.

It would seem that there are only a few approaches here.  First, no automated
merging is allowed - the script generates a proposed list of merges and a
human reviews it and blesses them.  Or second, the script examines each
potential merge by applying some rules (outside the purview of the XTM
standard).  Any questionable decisions would be logged.  Here is an area by
which different vendors could differentiate themselves.  I can imagine a fuzzy
or neural based system that dereferences urls and tries to figure out whether
two topics should in fact be merged

I don't see how you could ever get perfection in this situation, so there will
need to be human intervention at some point.  The system needs to help the
human do this.


At some time in the future, when (if!) web pages are marked up with all kinds
of RDF metadata, it will be easier to automate this task.

Cheers,

Tom P

Lars Marius Garshol wrote -


>
> As I've posted earlier I have a topic map of free XML tools in XTM
> format, and when processing this I discovered a problem with these two
> topics:
>  ....
>
>
> They represent two different standards, with different acronyms, and
> yet they share a common base name (the expansion of the acronym).
> According to the topic naming constraint, these two topics should be
> merged, which is NOT what I want.
>
> The question is: what is an appropriate scope to use on these two base
> names to avoid having the topics forcibly merged?
>



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