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

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

[Piotr Kaminski]

> Thomas said:
> >  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?
>
> You can't assign scopes to topics, only to characteristics.  Steven has
> repeated the mantra often enough...  And since subject
> identification/indication is not a characteristic, it cannot be scoped.
>

Yes, I know, I used a bit of shorthand.  Create a public subject
representing the idea of the provenance of a topic (or set of topics).  Make
either an occurrence topic or a scope topic of that type. Assign it to the
topics of interest (or their names of a scope).  Information about the merge
or lack of it would become an occurrence of the topic you are assigning.   I
suggested mergemap because that applies to all (characteristics of ) the
topics in the map, and because scopes can prevent  automatic merges, which
is where we started from.

In other words, topic maps have several ways to annotate any element in a
map if you want to, so it must be possible to annotate with this kind of
information.

Cheers,

Tom P