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

[Murray Altheim <m.altheim@open.ac.uk>]

Thomas B. Passin wrote:

> 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".


You seem to be dealing with scopes from a querying standpoint. But scopes
are used throughout topic maps to combinatorily establish semantic "filters"
which affect merging rules, such that incorrect interpretation would lead
to incorrect merging behaviours, eg., the topic "Dog" being merged with
"George Bush", the former a base name in English, the latter a base name
in English (one may have other suitable names for the latter, but that is
a different discussion).


> 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.


I don't think it would be to anyone's advantage to have different

rules for single and multiple components, as it's a likely scenario
to (for example) add an additional scope to an existing component
while editing, in order to further disambiguate a concept or relation.


Having spent all of 2000 on the TopicMaps.Org Authoring Group, thinking 

about little else than topic maps, many of the use cases are familiar to
me. I hesitate to use the term, but I think of this as the "semantic
union of scopes", ie., the combination of individual scopes in the
linguistic sense. So in the Jimmy Carter example, the scope applied to
a topic or topic association is "a personal title, in English, applied
after 1977". I think it wrong to assume that this is in any way
equivalent to any one of the individual scopes, as before, this might
result in merging of *all* topics having base names in English, all
topics having temporal extents after 1977, etc. (regardless of meaning).
This simply won't do in practice. How to describe this may be up in the
air, but from a practical standpoint I guess I don't understand your
position. It would seem to create some very strange, erroneous results.
Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                  <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK

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