[topicmapmail] Subject Identifiers metadata

[Kal Ahmed]

On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 17:28, Dan Corwin wrote:
> *** 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.
> 
> If there truly were no such subject, Kal, then how can you discuss it
> so easily with us in both of your paragraphs above?
> 

What could you possibly want to say about it ? I can understand you
wanting to talk about the subject. I can understand you wanting to talk
about an assertion made about the subject (i.e. a name, occurrence or a
role in an association). I can understand you wanting to talk about the
<topic> element in XTM (or equivalent in some other serialisation). But
I can't see what you can possibly say about the "thing that we hang
assertions off of" - its essentially a non-entity that comes into being
only when we make an assertion about a subject.

There may be some philosophical point to wanting to do this, but its not
within the reach of my developer-brain ;-)

-- 
Kal Ahmed <kal@techquila.com>
techquila