[topicmapmail] Classification of occurrences using keywords

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Jason Cupp
|
| Well, I guess there are keywords and there are keywords, but maybe
| for topic maps they're all roses...

Well, no. That's why I am asking you what you mean when you say
"keywords". I guess what you write below constitutes an explanation.
 
| I guess I wanted to pose the question: is there room in topic maps
| for ambigious associations between any uncontrolled word found in a
| document and that document (like free text searches on the web)? 

There is certainly room in topic maps for ontologies with low
precision, which sounds a little like what you are asking for. But
doing precisely what you describe sounds like ordinary full-text
search, and full-text search engines already provide that, so there's
little reason to reimplement it with topic maps.

| I work with the Z39.50 protocol, and can choose to do a completely
| free-text search or limit my search to an abstact, keywords (made
| explicit by the author), publisher, etc...

You can do this with topic maps, too. The OKS, and even the Omnigator,
supports this.

| Is it practical for a topicmap to support the free-text search (make
| every occurance of a word a topic scoped accordingly), or is it too
| "against the grain"? 

It would be horribly inefficient, and it wouldn't give you anything
that a full-text search engine does not already give you. The whole
point with topic maps is to create a map of the concepts in the
original information, but a map in the scale 1:1 is not very useful,
because it ends up being equivalent to the original territory...

| I also think the "aboutness" association shouldn't always be a
| second-class citizen, in that it definately isn't a nonsense
| proposition.

I agree completely. In the topic map Steve and I made we have three
different "aboutness" associations, depending on the degree of
"aboutness". We found that that worked much better than just having a
single one.

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