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

[Murray Altheim <murray.altheim@sun.com>]

Piotr Kaminski wrote:
> 
> 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?

Since some seem to posit the life or death of topic maps based on the
answers to this question, I'll avoid it entirely by asking you to
provide a rationale for this assumption. I don't see any reason whatsoever
to divide all topics into "opaque" and "associations" (i.e., given a
choice between a bullet in the head or a hot poker in the ribs, I'll
take a martini, please...).

As for the second question, any reasonable application should be able 
to provide this information. The syntax alone can't do it of course, 
as we need to first perform any necessary TM processing, but following 
that a topic map "member" object (which say now exists in memory) 
should be able to locate its parent association, and any references 
should be able to be traversed in either direction. I don't see a 
technical difficulty in doing so, so your answer would be that we'd 
have to discuss this in terms of a specific application scenario. It 
certainly seems do-able. Maybe I'm not understanding the question
exactly. 

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim, SGML/XML Grease Monkey  <mailto:murray.altheim&#64;sun.com>
XML Technology Center
Sun Microsystems, 1601 Willow Rd., MS UMPK17-102, Menlo Park, CA 94025

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