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

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

* 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?

This is what you are supposed to use added themes on the <mergeMap>
element to represent. If you add the author as a theme to everything
that is merged in from the "correspondences" topic map everything that
author has asserted about anything will be scoped by the author.

In a later email you write:

| 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.

This is correct. What is the problem with this?
 
| You could assign scopes to track the origin of each association that
| ends up characterizing the merged topic, but this still wouldn't
| tell you what sources the topic was merged from and who (i.e. which
| topic map) asked for the merging.

This information you could get by means of source locators in the
infoset model (and implementations that follow it, which are most (or
possibly all) of the important ones). PMTM4 has a similar mechanism,
but I don't think that's made explicit in the PMTM4 document.

--Lars M.