Re: [topicmaps-comment] Topic, reifiying an adressable subject as rolein an association

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

Lars wrote -
>
> * Lars Marius Garshol
> |
> | I've made a note of this issue, and would like to hear other
> | people's opinions on this issue, and the possible utility of such a
> | constraint.  Personally I'd be happy to not bother about it. We can
> | probably think of lots of things one could do that make no sense,
> | but how good an idea it is to require all implementations to detect
> | and reject them is another matter.
>
> * Thomas B. Passin
> |
> | In my view, there are going to be a lot of idioms that some
> | processor will make use of but others won't really "understand".
> | One example would be if you needed an hierarchical, ordered list.
> | There are several reasonable approaches, but it's hard to believe
> | that a general purpose processor would be able to properly interpret
> | all of them.  This argues for spelling more things out in the specs.
> | Perhaps we could discuss alternatives for creating and handling such
> | "idioms"?
>
> That's a suggestion that has something going for it. A topic map
> "patterns" document might be the way to capture these idioms while we
> (the community) gather experience with representing different kinds of
> structures in topic maps.
>

Yes, if we could get some clear patterns published, perhaps people would
start trying to implement them and work with them, so we could get some
useful experience.  In turn, this might lead to additions to the specs in
the future.  Alternatively, it might lead to something analogous to the
EXSLT extensions to XSLT.  In fact, that might be a good model for adding
capability but having it be potentially useful to a range of systems rather
than just a single proprietary one.

Cheers,

Tom P