[topicmapmail] XTM Datatypes [Was: Adding weigths to associations]

[Murray Altheim]

Holger,

I believe you have solved the essential problem of establishing
a means of setting confidence of an association, but not the
more difficult task of including a floating point value in the
topic map. This requires the ability to identify a datatype for
a resource acting as a confidence value.

What I believe would be necessary is the ability to characterize
(in this particular case) a resource as a floating point value,
and *then* state this as a confidence level.

I've been talking about it for a year and so I'm back to working
on a datatypes topic map based on XML Schema. I'd prototyped
this last year but wasn't happy with the result, and was waiting
for a PSI specification from the TC to feel like I wasn't wasting
my time on a "wrong" syntax. Last night I built a fairly complex
topic map and was looking at its visualization using Ceryle, and
I'm pretty happy with the result. It may have some things that
some people consider unnecessary, such as keeping track of both
the type of datatype (primitive, derived, etc.) as well as the
place in the tree structure found at

   http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#built-in-datatypes

I'm also including all facets on each datatype. The whole thing
is quite large, though no larger than I suppose was necessary to
contain all the topics and associations (!).

I'm just finishing it up and will write up a brief web page
describing what it is, and listing the PSIs it establishes. I've
grabbed a PURL for Ceryle, and the topic map will be published
eventuallly using that PURL's base URI.

I hope to have this online by mid next week, and will announce
it here. I would appreciate any feedback, as given this is a
first draft I expect there are some errors.

Murray

Rath, Holger (empolis DA) wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> The solution is quite simple (explained on XTM level):
> 
> 1- You give your association an ID
[...]

> 2- You reify the assoc with a topic
[...]

> 3- You create a topic for the occurrence type "confidence" (or however you
> want to name it)
[...]

> 4- You create a data occurrence of type "confidence" for the topic reifying
> the assoc. Done.
[...]
> Fabrice Desrwrote:
> 
>>   Hello,
>>
>>  I need to qualify the confidence I have in a association, 
>>to express 
>>some "fuzzy" relationships. How can I achieve this with XTM ? My only 
>>idea so far has been to make the association an instance of a topic 
>>representing the weight. It is ok with a few discrete values for the 
>>weight, but not really manageable when using arbitrary floating point 
>>values.
>>  I'll welcome any ideas !
>>
>>  Thanks,
>>
>>	Fabrice


Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                  <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK

            If you're the first person in a new territory,
            you're likely to get shot at.
                                                     -- ma