[topicmapmail] Any design guidelines for roletyping?

[Steve Pepper]

At 20:42 01.01.2003 -0500, Thomas B. Passin wrote:
>Agreed, but it is still a naming issue rather than a fundamental modeling
>one.  I have started to make all my role topics types have lower-case names,
>and topic type names  (that is, topics I expect to be used primarily as
>types) as upper case.  Then I can distinguish them at once (and avoid
>name-based merging) even if the core word is the same.  This practice seems
>to be working well so far.

That doesn't make sense to me. I call that going over the top, in terms of
making explicit distinctions that are of no practical use and that will
confuser end users. To take the example Marc cited: would you really have
Puccini be a topic of type 'composer' and play roles of type 'COMPOSER'?
What on earth is the difference between the two subjects that these topics
represent?

The Omnigator has an interesting behaviour in relation to this, by the way.

* If the current topic is a topic type (e.g. "composer" in the Italian Opera
   topic map), you get a list of "Topics of this type".

* If the current topic is a role type (e.g. "person"), you get a list of
   "Players of this role".

* If the current topic is *both* a topic type and a role type, you get both
   lists ... *unless* the set of instances is identical, in which case the
   role players list is considered superfluous and is not shown.

A side effect of this is that it often reveals inconsistencies in the topic
map. (I just discovered one now, for the topic 'librettist': 46 topics of
that type, 49 players of that role. Franci, Lombardo and Vaucaire were
classified as writers by mistake. Now fixed.)

We really should re-market the Omnigator as a topic map debugger rather
than a topic map browser :)

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