Use and abuse of occurrence RE: [topicmapmail] Are FacetsReally Simple After All?

[Murray Altheim]

Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
[...]
> | But I think both facets-as-metadata and facets-in-FC are both very
> | important concepts, and I've been spending the past few weeks
> | implementing a Faceted Classification system in Topic Maps that uses
> | both sorts, where I attach FC-style Facets to Topics, and adorn
> | those Facets with _f_acets-as-properties (i.e., occurrences on the
> | Facet Topics). The terminology is unfortunate, but the structure and
> | concepts invaluable. I'm having some fun with inheritance of
> | transitive characteristics, etc., basically building a slot-like
> | KR/KM system.
> 
> Ah, I see. I think having PSIs in order to have a standardized way to
> represented faceted classification in topic maps would be useful. I
> also think, however, that once you have topic maps you can do *better*
> than faceted classification, and that you no longer need it.

Actually, I would respectfully disagree, now that I've had some time
to work through this using a specific ontology. Topic Maps provide
the ability to create references to resources and a way to create
organization for those references, but in and of themselves don't
provide an organizational "metaphor", so if the number of one's
Topics begins to look like a library-full, maybe a library metaphor
is what you need. Full text search is one thing, but organization is
another. I wouldn't say that Topic Maps are comparable to Faceted
Classification (they're very different things), but that they are
strongly complementary. Once I've ironed out the bugs I hope to
publish something on this subject.

> FC-in-TM can still be useful for those who have legacy FC data, though.

That would include a lot of libraries and other information
publishers.

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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