[topicmapmail] occurrence abuse ?

[Steve Pepper]

Bernard Vatant:

| You think people are lazy, and that's why they will use
| occurrence for a code, a phone number, an address, a short
| description or a long name (fuzzy boarder here, trying to fix it
| will lead to nowhere except religious wars), an application note
| ... whatever bit of information that they do not consider
| important enough to be made the subject of a distinct topic,
| although they know that in theory it could (should) be.
|
| I must confess I've done it many times, and will do again. Even
| though, as Murray and you, I long have considered to consider it
| as an abuse, a drift from the original thinking of topic maps
| "fathers". But now I'm not sure ...
|
| An abuse maybe, but a very pragmatic and efficient one. Maybe
| lazy people are right after all.

Jan Algermissen:

>to begin with: I am a lazy person too...and part of my intention
>was that I hoped someone would provide me with a reasonable
>justification for remaining lazy ;-)
>
>I think I basically agree with what you say above.
>
>[definitions from 13250 and XTM omitted]
>
>According to these (very flexible) definitions I agree, I just
>*think* that the intention was something else (that's why I am
>curious what the intention actually was).

My position is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with using
occurrences for codes, phone numbers, addresses, and the like.
In fact, it is eminently sensible and perfectly in line with the
"intention" of the "fathers". It is not a question of "laziness"
but of pragmatism and the requirements of the application.

Jan, I believe your feeling that this is an abuse is probably due
to your judgement being clouded by the "everything-is-a-topic"
view promoted by TMPM4 (now thankfully substantially moderated in
the Reference Model drafts). Everything is *not* a topic; only those
things are topics that the topic map author wants to make assertions
about. In most applications, the only useful thing you might want
to assert about a phone number is its owner. Does that justify
making it a topic? Not really: that information can equally well be
expressed by making the phone number an occurrence of the owner
and be done with it.

So why make things more complicated than they need to be?

In the case of a date, I often ask the question, how many events am I
in general likely to want to associate with dates of this type in this
application? If the answer is "usually, at most one", then I would
express the date as a typed occurrence of whatever event it pertains
to, rather than creating a new topic and using an association.

Put another way: A topic is a nexus for information about a given
subject. If you know that you are only going to have one piece of
information for topics of a certain type (say, phone numbers), then
it's worth considering whether you can get by without creating
topics for those things at all.

Steve

--
Steve Pepper, Chief Executive Officer <pepper@ontopia.net>
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34/WG3  Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps)
Ontopia AS, Waldemar Thranes gt. 98, N-0175 Oslo, Norway.
http://www.ontopia.net/ phone: +47-23233080 GSM: +47-90827246