[topicmapmail] Occurrence resource naming

[Steve Pepper]

Hi Knud and Alastair,

* Knud M=C3=B6ller:

| I havn't done much topic mapping lately,

Shame on you ;-)

| but can you not reify the=20
| occurrence and tell your application to display that topic's basename=20
| instead? Something along the following lines:
|=20
| <topic id=3D"reifiedOccurrence">
| 	<subjectIdentity>
| 		<resourceRef xlink:href=3D"#googleStressSearch"/>
| 	</subjectIdentity>
| 	<baseName>
| 		<baseNameString>'Stress' from Google</baseNameString>
|   	</baseName>
| </topic>

This is an alternative to the method I suggested, but the semantics
are subtly different.

When you reify an occurrence you are creating a topic that represents
the *relationship* between the topic and the resource, not a topic
that represents the resource itself.

There are some situations where this makes sense, but in my opinion,
Alastair's use case is not one of them. This is because the name of
a resource does not usually change depending on what topic it is an
occurrence of.

In other words, the name is a property of the resource itself, not
of the relationship between the resource and the topic that it is
"about".

| As far as I can see the XTM specification doesn't allow to specify=20
| basenames for occurences directly.

That is correct. We could have introduced a syntactic shortcut
for this, but decided against it on the grounds that "forcing"
users to create an explicit topic would help ensure that people
understood what they were doing.

Steve

--
Steve Pepper <pepper@ontopia.net>
Chief Strategy Officer, Ontopia
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3
Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps 1.0)
=20