Re: [topicmaps-comment] TAO vs. ERA

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

[Lars Marius Garshol]

> It's just a limitation of the shorthand notation.
>
> * Thomas B. Passin
> |
> | The whole situation can get out of hand rapidly.  Take an instanceOf
> | that refers to a topic.  The various names of that topic could in
> | theory have their own scopes.  Does that mean that the original
> | thing is NOT an instanceOf when the referenced topic (has a name
> | characteristic that) is out of scope?
>
> Absolutely not! The scopes of the names have nothing to do with the
> validity of the instance-of associations. The scopes of the names
> limit the validity of the names, and nothing else.
>
I'm not claiming anything different, but if you are going to select a scope
to apply by means of selecting its name, there can be an operational
impact - that, is suppose you wish to apply a scope whose topic has a
baseNameString "English".  If that name is not in scope, it might not be
listed to select (I'm using the case of a person choosing from a list box,
but the same thing could apply in other scenarios).   In this situation, one
could not apply that scope to do, for example, filtering, unless the name of
the scope were in scope.

To a degree, this can be considered to be a UI matter, but I think there is
also a modeling issue as well.  What would it mean to have scopes that apply
to the names of scoping topics?  Would this be useful or just confusing?

> | Extending this line of nasty inquiry, the scope topics themselves
> | (their characteristics, of course) could be out of scope.  Do they
> | then apply or not?
>
> There is no such thing as scope on a topic, so I don't know what you
> are talking about here.
>
That's why I included the parenthetical text "(their characteristics, of
course)", to indicate I know that scopes apply to the characteristics rather
than to the topics per se.

> | I don't think it is useful to use scopes with topics when they are
> | applied as scopes or instanceOfs.  Does anyone have any examples
> | that show the opposite here?
>
> What do you mean by "use scopes with topics"? Another thing is that
> you can't scope the inclusion of a topic in a scope.
>

What do you expect scopes to be used for?  Among other things, to filter
topics and associations, to group like things together, to adjust displayed
labels for different languages, and to label displayed items with some kind
of context-like information - there will be many other applications as well,
right?  If you want to filter a displayed list of topic names so that only
names having one specific scope display, that would be an example of a "use
of scopes with topics".  By the phrase, I meant the application of scopes to
topic characteristics in any of these useful ways.

Cheers,

Tom P