Re: [topicmaps-comment] Topic maps 'float above' resources?

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

[Robert Barta]

> On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 10:41:54AM +0000, Kal Ahmed wrote:
> > At 09:23 19/12/2001 +0100, Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> > >I would put this differently. Topic maps *are* connected to the
> > >resources they describe (using links, as you correctly point out), but
> > >in contrast with, say metadata tags, they live outside the resources.
> > >This is really the key point: you don't need to change your documents
> > >in order to describe them with topic maps.
> >
> > And I would add that if you make more extensive use of topic map merging
> > than we see in many extant applications, it is possible to take this
> > conceptual division between "the map" and "the territory" one step
further,
> > by creating a topic map of the subjects and the relationships between
them
> > and a second map containing only the subjects and their occurrences, and
> > merging the two to produce a fully "connected" topic map,....
>
> I here supervise students authoring topic maps covering mainly
Internet-related
> material. With these themes I push them pretty deep into technical areas.
> My impression is that TM expressiveness scales quite well there.
>
> Maybe we should slowly remove the 'map' and 'terrain' distinction from our
> tutorials. It was pretty arbitrary in the first place, IMHO.
>

Actually, that distinction speaks reasonably well to me.  There are
addressable resources that are used as occurrences, and there are concepts,
represented by topics.  The resources can exist "out there", whether any
topics are created about them or not.  In this view, an occurrence acts as a
bridge between a resource in the "world" and a concept, which is a mental or
computer thing.  Such a bridge is indispensible for representing information
about the world, I suggest.

I realize that one can concoct all kinds of examples where the occurrences
exist solely within a topic map, or don't represent things in the world that
can actually be dereferenced, but that is a layer of sophistication that
does not remove the distinction (for me, at least).

This bridge metaphor can be effective in helping newcomers to understand the
idea of topic maps, I think.

Cheers,

Tom P