[topicmapmail] basics II - Inheritance in Topic Maps

[Murray Altheim]

Robert Barta wrote:
 > On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 05:02:18PM +0200, Lieberknecht, Katharina wrote:
 >> My question is, how does inheritance work with topic maps?
 >
 > Katharina,
 >
 > As Kal writes in this thread TMs are agnostic in respect to OO or
 > functional or other modelling paradigms. I think this was a wise
 > decision. It puts you (the ontology engineer) in charge instead of
 > pulling a particular model over the universe.
 >
 > This implies that _you_ define in your ontology what _inheritance_
 > means for you (there are as many inheritance concepts as there are OO
 > languages I reckon). See below.
[...]
 > Unfortunately, we do not have an official TM ontology language yet.
[...]

Robert,

I have been enjoying your exchange on this subject and don't mean to
diminish the importance of it, but I'm *glad* we don't have an official
TM ontology language. I sometimes think we need a metalanguage, a way of
expressing ontologies, but I'm following the discussions over on the
Common Logic list (in mind of creating an XML serialization of whatever
they finally agree upon), and it seems fairly obvious that they are just
one religious school among many. Now, if there was some way of creating
a TM-based meta-ontology language that was agnostic as to the model theory,
I'd be in favour and would probably be working on it right now. But I'm
doubtful. This doesn't mean I'm not interested in an ontology language,
but I don't think of "official" ontologies as anything but coercive in
the end.

I'd be keen on hearing your thoughts on what might constitute some sort
of meta-language that *might* be relatively agnostic.

Murray

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

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