Re: [topicmaps-comment] Re: RDF/Topic Maps: late/lazy reificationvs.early/preemptive reification

[Piotr Kaminski <piotr@ideanest.com>]

Thanks Murray and Thomas, that's pretty much what I was looking for.
Naturally, more questions follow.  :-)

Part of Murray's proposed map:
>     <topic id="reif-m1">
>       <subjectIdentity>
>         <subjectIndicatorRef xlink:href="#m1"/>
>       </subjectIdentity>
>       ...
>     </topic>

What is the nature of this topic?  AFAICT, in TM there are two kinds of
topics:  opaque ones, which reify some unstructured subject, and
associations, which reify relationships.  What kind of topic would this
be?  Given a reference to this reified role-playing topic, is there any
way to find out which association, role and player triple it reifies?

David Riegelnig proposed a different approach:
> To meet your (reasonable) request not to change the original membership
> assocation (roles: club,member*), sponsorship-associations could be
added,
> one for each membership. Such association would have the following
> role/roleplayer-pairs:
> - sponsor role, played by a sponsor subject
> - person role, played by a person subject (wich already plays a member
role
> in the original membership association)
> - sponsored membership role, played by the subject representing THE
MEMBER
> ROLE of the original membership association.
>
> Every sponsorship-association now reifies just the "sponsoring event"
(like
> "the buttering"...)
> - without any redundancies and
> - without the necessity of rearranging the existing membership
association.

I have two problems with this:

1.  You can't use "the member role" as the third player.  The role is the
same for all members and associations.  You want to use the "topic playing
the role" subject, as reified above by Murray and Thomas.  Either that, or
I completely misunderstood what you meant.  :-)

2.  There is redundancy:  you're effectively recording the membership of
the club in two places.  Once in the original association, and again in
the sponsorship associations you're creating.

> Let's see whether Topic Maps make their way into the "early,arbitrary
> depth"-camp.

Not quite yet.  :-)  This will depend on the answer to my very first
question above.

        -- P.

--
  Piotr Kaminski <piotr@ideanest.com>  http://www.ideanest.com/
  "It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance."