[topicmapmail] Are Facets Really Simple After All?

[Bernard Vatant]

Murray

>  ... but for storage
> of Topic metadata/properties of the RDF ilk, maybe we could put
> it all within just one second Topic whose purpose is explicitly
> to store Topic metadata. Its type would be recognized as such,
> and we'd only double our number of <topic> elements. The subject
> of each of those proxy Topics would basically be "the metadata
> of Topic X", and there'd be a "hasProperty" Association between
> them (as opposed to a "hasFacet" property for facets).

Hmmm ... only double the number of topics for just attaching metadata is
somehow heavy, but seems a lesser evil the system could live with.
Unfortunately, seems to me it's worse than doubling: potentially triggering
the recursive creation of an infinite sequence of topics.

Say Topic X1 is used to store metadata about Topic X0. Say this is done for
every topic in my base.
So it includes X1, and if this is an automatic process, e.g for creation
date of the topic, see what happens:

X1 stores the information : "X0 was created at time T0"
X2 stores the information : "X1 was created at time T1"
X3 stores the information : "X2 was created at time T2"

and the system explodes ... unless you forbid the "metadata type" topics to
have themselves metadata. Not very clean.

Bernard

Bernard Vatant
Senior Consultant
Knowledge Engineering
Mondeca - www.mondeca.com
bernard.vatant@mondeca.com