Re: [topicmaps-comment] multilingual thesaurus - language, scope,and topic naming constraint

[Kal Ahmed <kal@techquila.com>]

At 19:44 31/01/2002 -0500, Thomas B. Passin wrote:
>[Bernard Vatant]
>
> >
> > I stumbled on a case where different descriptors have the same name in
> >some languages, and different ones in some others.
> >...
> > It looks like english, german and french makes the difference, whereas
>dutch, danish and spanish clearly don't ... although I'm pretty
> > sure they do distinguish the concepts (social science vs
> > economical system) but it does not show in the names the Thesaurus
> > provides.
> >
> > If I use languages as scopes - which is usual - how will
> > the topic naming constraint apply? Should my TM engine merge
> > topic1 and topic2, because they have the same name in the
> > scope "SPA"? Does not make sense ...
> >
>
>Apply more than one scope to each name, like "language", "social study",
>"activity".  It is the set of scopes that must match for the TNC to apply:
>
>"2. The scopes in which the base names occur are equal as defined by the
>scope equality principle. "

That would be the most complete course of action - but you would be 
effectively adding information to the thesaurus which does not currently 
exist. I would argue that unless you have the committee (and I guess that 
it was a committee ;-) that created the original thesaurus present or 
sufficient documentation from their deliberations to back up any additional 
distinctions you make, you will be creating an interpretation of the 
thesaurus, not a representation.

Cheers,

Kal