[topicmapmail] Survey of Actual Scope Use in Topic Maps

[Marc de Graauw]

* Lars Marius Garshol

| If you are interested in extending the coverage, here are some more
| topic maps you may look at:
| <skipped>

One the one hand it would be interesting to extend the TM base, but on the
other there is a methodological advantage in my approach: I've taken a sample
compiled by someone else for different purposes, so probably this sample is
random with respect to scope use.

(Jan did have a link to your i18n.ltm, but it was broken...)

| | Nevertheless the survey yields some (perhaps unsurprising) results
| | which my gut feeling tells me are not too far from the truth.
|
| Too far from current practice, you mean? :)

The One Universal All-Encompassing Truth :-) No, you are right, I did mean I
think the results reflect current practice.

| What does the "eml" category actually mean? I saw the description, but
| it didn't tell me anything, I must admit.

The first table lists scope use with:
- long name
- short name
- description

The second table uses the short names as column headers, so "eml" means "email
addresses". I should have described this better.

| In any case some conclusions seem clear:
|
|  - very few topic maps use scope to avoid the TNC, and so probably
|    they would break if the TNC were applied,

Either that or many of those Topic Maps have no ambigious names. By looking at
them, I found quite a few are based on structured data from elsewhere, so
maybe the names were unique to start with. But I must admit I did not study
all the Topic Maps in-depth, I just looked at <scope> and scoping topics.

|  - the use of scope is so far in its infancy.

True.

| In addition it appears that the idea of using scope for controlled
| vocabularies is relatively popular.
|
| Not sure what that means, though.

I think it is a quite natural use, given the TNC which is current standard.
Controlled vocabularies have unique names, so using scope is a way to state
they are unique within this scope.

It also seems the Ontopia invention of using scope for name direction in
associations has caught on.

Marc