Re: [topicmaps-comment] TAO vs. ERA

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

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| 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.

* Thomas B. Passin
|
| 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

If you're displaying a list of topics you should display all of them,
even if they have no name in the current scope, or even a name at all.
It's much better for the user to see that there's *something* there
than to hide the fact that there are more choices. Otherwise you will
in fact find yourself doing filtering of topics by scope.

Getting the wrong name is much better than getting no name, and even
getting "[No name]" is better than not getting the topic at all.

| 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?

I'm still not sure what it is you are thinking of here. Can you
explain in more detail, perhaps with an example?
 
* Thomas B. Passin
|
| 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?

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| There is no such thing as scope on a topic, so I don't know what you
| are talking about here.

* Thomas B. Passin
|
| 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.

In that case I can answer your question: the topics form part of the
scope you are looking at regardless of whether any of their
characteristics are in scope or not. If someone's put a topic into a
scope that topic is in that scope until someone takes it out again.
Scope filtering does not affect that at all.

It's good that you ask these questions, though. It shows that we have
more explaining to do than we thought.
 
| 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?  

Absolutely.

| 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.

Ah, I see. Then I misunderstood completely. Sorry. 

I guess it's probably better to talk about "scope filtering" in this
case. It's shorter and more precise.

--Lars M.