[topicmapmail] Subject Identifiers metadata

[Kal Ahmed]

I was talking about the thing that we conceptually use to represent a
subject - irrespective of its representation in some computer system. We
conceptually require this thing as a place to hang our statements about
the subject (assertions), but in itself it provide *no information at
all*.

Anyway, all this was only to say that I don't believe there is a subject
"the topic foo" that can be reified - you can of course reify the
<topic> foo or the topic record foo in a database and it is for these
concrete representations that we may want to provide metadata.

Cheers,

Kal

On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 02:44, Thomas B. Passin wrote:
> Kal Ahmed wrote:
> 
> > I'm not talking about reifying a <topic> element or reifying some
> > construct in a topic map processing engine. I'm talking about reifying a
> > topic construct. In the "binding point" model of topic maps, the topic
> > is essentially nothing but a place to hang assertions - in other words
> > it comes into being by a user making an assertion about a subject. So it
> > is the assertion that is created by the user, the topic being a
> > side-effect.
> > 
> 
> Well, now I don't undersatnd what you mean by "topic construct".  If you 
> don't mean a topic element in an xtm document, and you don't mean a 
> structure in a computer (that we conventionally call a "topic"), 
> whatever do you mean?
> 
> In topic maps, a topic represents a subject for the purposes of computer 
> processing.  If by "come into being by a user making an assertion about 
> a subject" you mean that id a topic id is refered to (say, in an 
> association) and no topic with that id is yet known to the system, then 
> the system would construct a topic with that id, I would say that you 
> now have a topic, so what is the problem (although you don't necessarily 
> know its subject at this point)?
> 
> If you mean that some set of associations imply the existence of a 
> subject that is up to now not represented in the computer by a topic, 
> then you could have the computer create such a topic.
> 
> If you mean something else, would you please explain some more?
> 
> And I think we have to be careful about the use of the word "assertion". 
>   It might be used to mean specifically an association in a topic map, 
> generally in a normal English usage sense, or colloquially as a 
> ahorthand for "statement" or "claim".  In the strict topic map sense, 
> you can have associations (or call the "assertions" if this is the new 
> jargon), but that refers to computer structures relating topics in the 
> topic map.  They are but proxies for  the real subjects and the real 
> relations between them.
> 
> I have a sense that several uses of the word are being mixed together 
> here, but I may be wrong about that because I'm not sure quite what you 
> are getting at.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Tom P
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-- 
Kal Ahmed <kal@techquila.com>
techquila