[topicmapmail] occurrence abuse ? Was: [geolang-comment] First proposals for ISO 639 and 3166 available

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Jan Algermissen
| 
| I think that neither the email address nor the birthdate is an
| occurrence of the topic, I think that they are properties and that
| they should be assigned to the topic via the use of associations
| (e.g. with a bornBeing-birthdate association). [1]

The problem with this is how to indicate that the subject of a topic
is a particular string. If you can't do that this solution doesn't
work at all.

| Also, making the date a resource 'hides' the fact that it is a
| subject in it's own right and it makes it much harder, for example,
| to lookup all beings that are born on that particular date.

That's not the case. In the OKS finding that out is no harder than
doing a single method call on an index.
 
| Since the <resourceData> element makes it so dangerously easy to
| take anything that comes in form of a string (dates, addresses,
| measurements (e.g. height of a person)), wrap it inside
| <resourceData> and make it an occurrence of a topic I am curious

And for the record, I agree with Bernard and Steve. This isn't abuse
or laziness at all, it's the way the model was meant to be used.
 
| [1] Since we can consider the email address to be an unambigous
|     identifier of the topic, it might be a solution to make it a base
|     name.

It's not a name, so I wouldn't consider that correct use of base
names. They were always meant to be displayable.

What we *really* need is support in TMCL for declaring that the values
of a particular occurrence type must be unique. Processors could then
use such occurrences to do merging, without forcing people to abuse
base names to get the same effect.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >