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

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

Thomas B. Passin wrote:

> [Murray Altheim]
>>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).
> 
> Yes, I used querying just to have a single expression use, but merging would
> have done as well.  That is an interesting, thought, though.  Maybe
> different behavior with respect to scopes would be wanted for querying than
> for merging.


I think your use case can be managed without altering the existing
processing model for topic maps. Locating all topics having a base
name containing a given scope is relatively simple conceptually,
and while I've not yet done this myself it shouldn't be difficult
to code either. It could actually be done using XPath if the topic
map was "consistent" [1], ie., one topic per subject and no further
merging to be performed.

Murray

[1] http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/index.html#desc-consistent-topic-map
......................................................................
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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