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

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

* Robert Barta
| 
| Maybe we should slowly remove the 'map' and 'terrain' distinction
| from our tutorials. It was pretty arbitrary in the first place,
| IMHO.

I agree with Tom that it works well for newcomers, since it shows very
clearly how the topic map sits outside the information it describes,
which is a crucial point.

The distinction has become increasingly artificial, however, and at
the moment I think it's primarily psychological and practical.
Practical in the sense that we store most of the actual resources
outside the topic map. Psychological in the sense that we think about
the topic layer and the resource layer as separate, even though the
resource layer does include the topic map itself.

This being said I still think that what Kal wrote...

* Kal Ahmed
|
| 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,....

...makes eminent sense, since it's a very economical and practical way
to reuse topic maps. So topic maps do 'float above' resources in many
ways, even though there's no hard conceptual distinction.

--Lars M.