Re: [topicmaps-comment] TAO vs. ERA

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

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| 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.

* Thomas B. Passin
| 
| 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.

We're talking about completely different things. I am talking about
what you should do when you've applied some process, found a set of
topics, and want to present them to the user.

As far as I can tell, what you are talking about is the process of
arriving at that set of topics.
 
| 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.

Very good. What you do then is to tell the system that you want to see
those 8 topics, by whatever criterion distinguishes them from the
other topics, and the system should do that.
 
| 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.

I don't mean that you should always show all topics! (I may sound like
I am crazy, but in reality I am just slightly deranged.)

The question is: once you've arrived at the set of topics you want to
show, what do you do when you discover that some of them don't have
names, or they don't have names in the scope set by the user?

I do have a problem with your process for arriving at the 8 topics
relevant to "airplane", though. You say you select the scoping topic
"airplane", and this somehow produces the list of 8. By scope
filtering? If so, how?
 
* 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?
 
* Thomas B. Passin
|
| 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?

I see your point. There are many possible scope matching operators,
and for this it sounds like you want one that prefers the
characteristics that have the most themes in common with the filtering
context. This is what we generally use.

I am still confused by one thing, though. You say "the scope of
'airplane' does not filter that list of scoping topics". How do you
filter a list of topics by scope?
 
| You see, it can get interesting!

Oh, I never doubted that. It just gets hard when I don't know what you
are talking about. :-)

--Lars M.