[topicmapmail] Superclass-subclass indentation in the Omnigat or

[Robert Barta]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 10:32:15AM -0500, Dicheva, Darina wrote:
> > I think the standards people did a _good_ job not to hard-code a set
> > of relations in the XTM standard, like
> > 
> >   - component-member (wing/airplane)
> >   - member-collection (tree/forest)
> >   - portion-mass (slice)
> >   - place-area (city/country)
> >   ....
> > 
> > They seem to be far too application specific. 
> 
> yes - you are right about not hard-coding specific relations in the XTM
> standard, however,  "part-of" is general and necessary for representing even
> very very simple ontologies, in fact the relationships listed above are all
> kind of "part-of" relations, so if I don't want to be very specific in my
> ontology I can use "part-of" for expressing them, but I cannot use "is-a"
> for that.

Darina,

That's exactly the way I see it, you need some "part-of" association
type whereever you look. I would bet, though, that if "part-of" would
have been part of XTM, then people would have abused it heavily (I
mark student maps, I know how abusive people can become :-).

I guess it reminds us that we should not trust too much predefined
vocabularies unless they are there for a reason other than mere
uniformness.

\rho