Re: [topicmaps-comment] Mapping Topics to Cyc: How To Handle Scope?

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@comcast.net>]

OK, so let us apply this to Murray's earlier test case adn see what we have.
He proposed

"... a topic "Jimmy Carter" with a base name
"President" (since he could be called that after he was elected)
whose scope is

      scope of titles
      scope of English
      scope of time "after 1977"
"

With "any", we get his title if any of these three scopes is in effect:

titles,
English,
(OR) "after 1977".

Agreed?  If we are interested in titles, we can find this base name even if
we have not specified "after 1977", as long as we have specified "titles".
That is my understanding of "any".

That is fine for applying a scope with a single component, but what if we
impose a compound scope consisting of both "titles" and "after 1977"?  I was
not thinking of this case earlier.  Murray probably was ahead of me and
thinking of this case.  Should the baseName string "Jummy Carter" be
considered valid?

This reminds me of comparisons of node sets in XPath predicates, for which
there are definite rules.  For equality, for example, each node in the node
set to the left of the equals sign is tested against each node in the node
set to the right of the equals sign, and if any one node of the one set
matches any one node of the other, the two compare equal (as best I recall).

Perhaps we should adopt similar rules for Topic Maps.

Cheers,

Tom P