Re: [topicmaps-comment] TAO vs. ERA

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

> * 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
>
> * Lars Marius Garshol
> 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.
>

Not necessarily.  I have found it useful to filter by scope to reduce the
size of a list of topic names and to focus attention on just the ones of
interest.

For example, suppose you have 800 topics.  Of these, 25 are only used for
scoping, 15 are used as the types of occurrences and 15 are used as types of
associations.  There are eight topics that apply to "airplane", and you want
to select and view information on them.  What you don't want to have to do
is to scroll through a list of 800 topic names (or more, if they have
multiple names) and try to guess which ones are relevant.  What's more, the
scoping and occurrence types just clutter up the list of topics, because you
aren't looking for that kind of topic.

Better to look through a list of scoping topics, and pick the name
"airplane".  After filtering with that scope, you see a list of eight
topics, making it much easier to decide which ones to look at in more
detail.  This is an example where you **do not** want to see all topics,
names or not.

> * Thomas B. Passin
| 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?

> * Lars Marius Garshol
> I'm still not sure what it is you are thinking of here. Can you
> explain in more detail, perhaps with an example?

In this example, say that you have filtered by "airplane".  That scoping
topic's name will probably not itself be scoped by "airplane".  So you want
to make sure that the scope of "airplane" does not filter that list of
scoping topics, or you won't see that scoping topic again.  On the other
hand, you might want the scope called "french" to apply so that you could
see the names of scoping topics in french.  How do you decide which scopes
to apply to scoping topics and when to apply them?  And what kinds of
scoping topics make sense to apply to the names of other scoping topics?

You see, it can get interesting!

Cheers,

Tom P