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

["Seidl, Andy" <Andy.Seidl@Starbase.com>]

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

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

This distinction is artificial, but I would not call it arbitrary.
Instead, I suggest the map/terrain "pattern" has been "selected" for
use so often because it does, in fact, outperform alternative
metaphors as a descriptive device.

The analogy stems, of course, from the real-world terrain and the
real-world maps of the terrain.  The distinction between those is
now obvious.  But it is equally easy to imagine a large library of
maps that contains a card catalog index of all the maps.  Now,
we have a map of maps and the first set of maps becomes--in the
map/terrain pattern--the "terrain" for the card catalog "map".

When we move into cyberspace, its even easier to confuse (i.e., treat
as arbitrary) what is "map" and what is "terrain".  And, depending on
the problem at hand, a given cyberspace object may be best described
as "map" in once case and as "terrain" in another case.  Still, the
map/terrain pattern is an extremely efficient communication device.

My vote: retain the map/terrain metaphor in tutorials.  To improve
on its use, we can do more to explain that this pattern operates
at many levels and that typical introductory tutorials use it at
only one level.

  -- fas

-----Original Message-----
From: Lars Marius Garshol [mailto:larsga@garshol.priv.no]
Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2001 07:09 AM
To: topicmaps-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [topicmaps-comment] Topic maps 'float above' resources?

* 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.

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