[topicmapmail] Conceptual Graphs are Step 6

[Jack Park]

Thanks for the kind comments, Dan.

It does seem to me that a discussion of such a specific topic as 
conceptual graphs in the context of topic maps is, at once, appropriate, 
and out of scope for this list. Go figure. I suspect this list is best 
served by thinking through implementations, applications, and so forth 
of just topic maps. OTOH, conceptual graphs are only slightly north of 
"just topic maps" as applications go. Bernard Vatant spoke at XML 2004 
on the marriage of topic maps and ontologies. I suspect we should be 
discussing that here too. It's really hard to tell what to do here. But...

This list doesn't clog my inbox, so, what the heck, unless people ask us 
not to discuss CG and topic maps, whether XTM, RM or whatever, then, 
I'll contribute where I can.  Perhaps the largest problem will be to 
understand just what constitutes conceptual graphs for any kind of graph 
larger and more complicated than the toys we can find on the web. I 
think it was Murray who suggested that the CG standard doesn't go far 
enough. I'm not prepared to comment. Murray and I both follow the cg list.

The black belts of the RM are pretty well nailed to the wall with a 
schedule that calls for finalizing the contribution the RM, in whatever 
final form it may take, to the topic map standards effort. That's all 
slated to happen in a workshop in Montreal associated with Extreme 
Markup 2004. I'd love to be there, but that's unlikely. The result of 
that workshop will be presented to the world, as I understand it, at XML 
2004 in Washington D.C. I am presently planning on presenting and being 
at that conference. Until we see the final form, it will be easier just 
to understand the nature of the conceptual graph architecture and sort 
out how topic maps and cg graphs blend.

Cheers,
Jack

Dan Corwin wrote:

> Jack Park wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>> I suspect that the new RM is much closer to the right modeling tool 
>> for doing CGs and having topic maps fall out simultaneously, than is 
>> XTM.
>
>
> I would agree in principle.
>
> But precisely because it is "new", I think RM is still a bit mysterious
> to many people.  So to many readers of this list, talking about CGs
> using the RM would probably hurt overall clarity, not help it, or at
> least split their attention up between two competing subjects.
>
> Similar problems already cripple most discussion of CGs because their
> details soon turn to FOL - a language family as foreign to most people
> as those in Africa.  CGs are confusing *mostly* due to this FOL-speak.
>
> If you drop the FOL from CGs, you get a graph language based on the
> types of associations and roles used in English sentences - a very
> useful tool for building highly intuitive semantic nets, which with
> just a few standards added could become very efffective topic maps.
>
> The specific role types and their meanings are the core of what CGs
> have to say, and they would become the heart of any XTM-CG standard.
> A good introduction to such types, with minimal FOL-speak, is:
>
>   http://users.bestweb.net/%7Esowa/ontology/thematic.htm
>
> XTM 1.0 and a few PSIs are *all one requires* to express such graphs
> formally and portable as associations any topic map engine can load.
>
> But for readability and brevity on this thread, I'd hope most CG models
> we discuss here might actually be presented in LTM, not XTM.
>
> Either notation has the big advantage that anyone on this list can
> follow it and contribute.
> <snip>
>
> Cheers,
> Dan Corwin
>
>
>
>