Re: [topicmapmail] Re: [topicmaps-comment] Notions have existence .....

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

[Piotr Kaminski]

> In other words:  If I merge in a  "correspondences" map (one that
> expresses opinions about subjects being identical) from an author whom I
> do not trust, what characteristics in the resulting model inform me about
> the reason that topics got merged?  There can't be any since, to speak
> about topics being merged (with e.g. a "corresponds" association that has
> multiple "sources" and one "target"), we would need to reference the
> original topics which, be definition, no longer exist.
>
> I'm sure somebody will be kind enough to inform me if I've missed
> something obvious.  Or perhaps nobody cares about preserving information
> about merges in a topic map?
>
 Isn't this just what the megeMap element is for?  So you can prevent
inadvertent merges by assigning additional scopes to all the topics in the
to-be-imported map?  Then you could arrange so the processor could go ahead
an merge the topics anyway, on a global or case-by-case basis.  And the
scope, being a topic, could have one or more occurrences that would capture
the information that Piotr is talking about.

Sounds very workable to me, although I haven't tried it.  I'll bet Sam H.
could say something about this, right, Sam?

Cheers,

Tom P