[topicmapmail] Re: paradigmatic PSIs

[Ann M Wrightson]

(small extension of mail previously sent to sc34wg3)

"The paradigm" (as far as we can judge from its apparent phenomena) appears
to assume that:

Subjects are atomic
Subjects are identifiable
Subjects are persistent
Subjects have no dependency on domain, perspective, user, etc etc

Thus:

IMO the trouble here is exactly that "The paradigm can't really handle *all*
subjects, without any exceptions". It's (just) possible that some
interestingly large community will succeed, using the paradigm. It's quite
likely that many communities of useful size will succeed - by virtue of
their existing (implied or express) consesnsus regarding subjecthood, or by
using an agreed set or scheme of subjects. Hope for wider kinds of
universality is admirable but hopeless.

Why?

The identification of a subject is *relative to the intended use of the
identified subject* as has been found by many developers of thesauri and
classification schemes. Further, adequate identification of a subject can be
a distinctly non-trivial matter (even though lots of them, such as "opera",
"aria", "nuclear assembly", come ready-identified within a community sharing
enough common language and culture).

...and this is for the not-so-simple reason that a subject-as-identified is
generally not absolute, but a *situated entity*. Some come v. close to being
absolute (eg discrete physical objects, named-and-defined abstractions) -
and these tend to be used in examples, naturally enough. But in general, the
identification of a subject is something which depends on the agent (human
or other) doing the identifying; in particular, there can be subtle but
significant differences across linguistic frameworks (Simple example - you
might consider "blue" in English to identify the same subject (a colour) as
"glas" in Welsh, and it does for some purposes, like identifying the colour
of a car - but it certainly does not identify the same subject for other
purposes, like identifying the colour of the foliage of a plant.)

Ann W.