Re: [topicmaps-comment] Challenge Part 1 - Part 2

[Piotr Kaminski <piotr@ideanest.com>]

Bernard said:
> the "fundamentalist" position
> that everything has to be turned into a topic, and every relationship
> into an association, is unsustainable.

I can see why you don't want everything to be a heavy-weight topic for
humans entering or retrieving the information; it makes sense that some
pieces of data are secondary, and should only be displayed together with
their central subjects.  However, this seems to me to be a task for the
presentation system, and not a primitive distinction that needs to be
enshrined in the fundamental model.

Can you expand further on why you think the "fundamentalist" approach is
unsustainable?  In my opinion, a fundamentalist model will provide a
flexible basis on which to build different presentations and will allow
for information interchange outside of the context in which it was first
captured.

To provide a (somewhat strained) example, suppose I was doing a study on
the social aspects of making predictions.  Your example statement would be
one of the "data points" in my study, along with as many others as I could
find.  If I am interested in finding patterns in the levels of certainty
expressed, or in the percentages quoted (or a correlation between them?),
then those pieces of information become primary topics within my context.

Obviously, any given way of representing information will not be suitable
for all contexts, but we should at least avoid putting up artifical
barriers to interchange and repurposability (is that a word?).

        -- P.

--
  Piotr Kaminski <piotr@ideanest.com>  http://www.ideanest.com/
  "It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance."