Re: [xtm-wg] Topic Naming Constraint question

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

* Thomas B. Passin
|
| 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. 

Well, actually the script has perfect knowledge of this.  There are
two separate <STANDARD> elements, and so it knows that these two
standards are different. The trouble is just that topic map software
insists that they be merged.

| 1) In Lars' example, the two topics have two basenames each.  The
| script could require a match on all basenames before automatically
| merging the topics. 

Nope.  The spec allows us no such leeway.  If one basename is equal to
that of another topic (with the same scope) those two topics must be
merged.

| 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.

In this case also the spec decides what is to happen. There is no
leeway at all.

The problem here is really the spec decides what you have to do, and
it doesn't seem to work out very well when matched up with what people
actually do and want to do.

| 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.

Not really. I'm starting out with a highly structured XML document, so
you would really have no better starting point if you used an RDBMS or
an RDF model.

--Lars M.


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