Re: [topicmaps-comment] TAO vs. ERA

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

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| 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?

* Thomas B. Passin
| 
| You retrieve only topics whose name has a scope that matches the
| scoping topic named "airplane".

Right. So to find the topics relevant to "airplane" you find all
topics that have names in that scope. That sounds like an abuse of
topic maps semantics to me, for two reasons. The first is that if the
topic has "airplane" in the scope of one of its names that must mean
that the name is somehow restricted to that scope, which I doubt is
the case. The second is that it does not imply in any way that the
topic is related to airplanes.

I think what you want is a "related-to" association between "airplane"
and the 8 topics, rather than use scope. Or, actually, the "related-to"
association is just an untyped association, so you'd most likely want
to express what the relationship actually is. And then you'd most
likely find that these 8 topics are terms relevant to the field of
"aviation", or something like it.

--Lars M.