[topicmapmail] TopicMaps in Topics

[Murray Altheim]

Stefan Lischke wrote:
> Murray Altheim wrote:
>> 
>>>me worte:....................If u have problems with the "zoom" just 
>>>imagine two peoples who are talking about a topic and they do not 
>>>know if they are talking about the same, so person A asks person B 
>>>"what do u mean exactly, can u describe "Buys" in more detail for me, 
>>>so i can see if i have a topic which "means" the same but maybe has 
>>>not the same basename or SI than yours"
>>> 
>>>Is there any known technique of different abstraction layers for 
>>>TopicMaps?
>>>Or any protocol for doing knowledge exchange in the way i described 
>>>in words?
>>
>>You're essentially describing a structure similar to a knowledge
>>base, built upon an ontology. This is the kind of thing that most
>>knowledge representation systems are designed to handle and is
>>not a feature specific to Topic Maps. I happen to be implementing a
>>system similar to this using Topic Maps, but it could be done in
>>Protege, Cyc, OCML, OWL, any frame-based system, etc. Each concept
>>and relation is defined as a specialization of successively more
>>general concepts and predicates in a rooted tree. In Cyc, this
>>root is called "#$Thing". Everything inherits from #$Thing.
> 
> Oh thats cool whats the name of your project? is it ceryle?

Yes.

> How do u separated your different layers of abstraction? You splitted it 
> in different TopicMap, for example each specialization  of a concept in 
> an own TM, or do u have one big  knowledgebase and  an association type 
> like "specialize".

I have a modular system, whereby the processor can open a specific module
(say, the Place or Character module), or open a "driver" document that
calls all the modules in succession. There is inheritance of both concepts
and relations. Relations are a descendant of the root concept,

           --- Thing --------
          /       |          \
         /        |           \
     Concept  SpatialThing  TemporalThing
       |               \        /
       |                \      /
     Relation            Object

etc.

> There is another question: How can u say with TopicMaps, that a TopicMap 
> subgraph is specializing a single topic? should i use the single topic 
> as scope for all topics and associations in the subgraph?

This is a feature of merging, in that when you bring an external
XTM document in via the <mergeMap> element, you can add a scope
to all incoming topics to keep them distinguished from those in
the original document. The concept of "subgraph" doesn't really
exist in Topic Maps, but you can support the idea via software.

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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