Re: [topicmaps-comment] TAO vs. ERA

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

* Robert Barta
| 
| This means that
| 
|   lars-marius (person) # using instanceOf here
| 
| is an appropriate use of instanceOf and
| 
|   person (living-being) # also here
| 
| is not?

Exactly.
 

| Then obviously the thinking to add <instanceOf> in the first place
| 
|   http://www.doctypes.org/xtm/syntax/Ontopia-syntax-comments.html#TOPIC
| 
| was to facilitate 'down-stream' topic map authors, i.e. those who
| already have an ontology around and should only fill this with
| 'instances'.

This wasn't the thinking at all, actually. It was just that the
<instanceOf> element was so much simpler than a full-blown
association, and for something that was used this often that was a big
win. 99% of all topics are instances of a class, so it seemed strange
to take away the shortcut that HyTM had for this.
 
| And this means that ontologies should use a dedicated association of
| type
| 
|   http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/#desc-class-instance
| 
| ?

Not in our minds. They should use it if they need to scope the
class-instance relationship, which is not all that common, and if they
don't they can just use <instanceOf>.

--Lars M.