Re: [topicmaps-comment] TAO vs. ERA

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

[Lars Marius Garshol
>
> * 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.
>
Just so.

>...
>
> 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?
>

You retrieve only topics whose name has a scope that matches the scoping
topic named "airplane".  My system has an API call to ask for such a list
(actually, the filter is a list of scopes, rather than just one, and there
are two such calls, one to, in effect,  AND the scopes together, the other
to OR them together ).  Then you just display the list in some kind of a
list box.  The effect, of course, is similar to filtering by keyword in some
other (non-TM) system.

> * 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.
>

You could use some kind of a fuzzy match, I would think - I haven't
experimented with anything like that yet.

> 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?
>

To expand on what I said above (I hope I made it clear), you take each name
of each topic in the list (which might be a list - or set, or whatever - of
all the topics in the map), and for each name, check to see if it has a
scope that matches the given scope.  If so, you add that topic to the list
of topics to be returned.  At least that's how I'm doing it.  I'm doing it
in javascript so I'm using javascript arrays but it amounts to the same
thing.  You might do it differently if you had specialized indexes or were
traversing graphs.

Cheers,

Tom P