[topicmaps-comment] Challenge Part 1 - Variable Values

[Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>]

Hello folks

A challenge in two parts, to try and prevent the community to fall 
into some long deep winter sleep.

Part 1. What shall we do with variable values, and singularly 
numeric values? 

Let's take the following assertion, and try to turn the information it
contains into a topic map representation.

"By the end of 2001, France Telecom will control more than 30% of 
the Swedish phone market"

This is no academic exercise. Mondeca works with a partner on 
data mining tools, and that is the kind of things we have to transfer 
on the fly in the data base, without losing any critical information. 
We think this kind of situations should be addressed in some 
standard or at least consensual way, that's why I put this on the 
table.

We can create some topics and their classification:

"France Telecom" (instanceOf "company")
"Sweden" (instanceOf "country")
"phone market" (instanceOf "market sector")

And create a simple association linking those three guys, 
asserting that FT is present in the phone market in Sweden.
(So far, so good)

-- What shall we do with "by the end of 2001"? 
Create an ad hoc temporal topic, 
and scope the association with it? 
Doable but not very clean. And how will I merge that with other 
infos using "2001Q4" or any other time appellation?

-- And what about "more than 30%"? It sounds silly to create a 
topic "more than 30%". 
Assuming we do that, how do we use it? As another member in the 
association? But what does that mean? When processing this 
topic, we'll catch together all associations where "something is 
more than 30% of some other thing". Speak about semantics ...

The only proper way to do it seems to reify the association, and 
attach to it this "more than 30%" as an occurrence of a definite 
type, through a <resourceData> element.

Bottom line(s). 

1. Is treating values through <occurrence> and <resourceData> to 
be systematic for any kind of numeric assertion?
2. Should not there be some annex to the spec recommending 
standard practises for handling numeric values?

Cheers

Bernard


Bernard Vatant - Consultant
bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
Mondeca - "Making Sense of Content"
www.mondeca.com