[topicmapmail] Not just Temporality in Topic Maps, but a whole approach

[Bernard Vatant]

Hi Simon

I've been lurking at that thread, and have some comments on your 
original posting below and some of the follow-up. But first, since you 
were wondering which kind of people we are in this forum ("all kinds" is 
the answer that jumps to my mind after almost 6 years, more below), I 
started to wonder who Simon Grant was, and guess I found out at [1]. 
Quick cross-checking suggested that this Simon Grant here, and that one 
there, were probably the same, at least in some high-level and informal 
sense of same-ness. Browsing around this page yields a lot of 
interesting food for thought, by the way.

Now to the point. I agree with Kal globally, and particularly when he 
writes :

> My approach of late has been to shield users from topic maps almost
completely. There is really no reason at all why an application user needs
to know about the underlying model for representation. 

I would even say there generally are all sorts of reasons why the 
(regular) user does not want to know, or does not care about the 
representation tools used by the system. This is technology. You have 
techies (say, 10% or less of users)  and you have the other kind of 
folks (90% or more). Take cars : you have mechanics fans, who would not 
buy a car without browsing the whole of technical specification down to 
the last nuts and bolts, and you have the regular user (like me, as long 
as cars are concerned), for which the best mechanics is the one which is 
neither heard nor heard of. Turn the key and hit the road. Same with 
computers, same with software, including knowledge management systems. 
Regular users are interested in interfaces, functions, ergonomy, IOW in 
the dynamics of the system, how they process, query, interact with 
stored data/information/knowledge (as you like to call it). And the same 
person can be a regular user for these systems and a techie for those. 
So it's not a question of how human thinking is formatted, it's also a 
question of the kind of involvment and interaction you want to have with 
the system.

Now if the question is : are topic map - based systems more likely (than 
other systems) to meet human requirements in terms of interaction, I 
think this question is a non-starter. There are so many technical ways 
to interact with the same formal structures (read, the same structured 
data), and there are so may tools to implement this interaction. You can 
be transparent and show the mechanics, or implement interfaces that hide 
everything, or even make things look like what they are not, make RDF 
look like topic maps, and the other way round. See Nikita and his famous 
glasses [2]. Take identity : with some glasses, or at a certain level of 
detail, a pack of data can appear as constituting one 
thing/topic/entity, and seen with other glasses appear as several 
distinct entities, etc.

In Mondeca we've been working with the same generic data model for six 
years. We've implemented integrated systems around it "as if" it was 
topic maps, then "as if" it was RDF, and "as if" it was conceptual 
graphs, and what else tomorrow, without changing anything at the core. 
Some implementations/user interact as if it were a regular data base 
with capacity for "smart" queries, other a repository of reference 
terminology for text mining tools, other a knowledge base, other a 
thesaurus management tool, you name it. The key is genericity, 
flexibility, and imagination in implementation. No free lunch :-) .

As for the question in your last message.

 > What sense of identity does this list have? What it is, who it is 
for, what kind of people belong to it, what are the topics which are 
discussed here, as opposed to those which are not?

As any forum and any human place, it is what people do of it. No formal 
answer to any of those questions I'm afraid. A list has no sense of 
identity, as far as I know. Maybe the members have some sense of 
identity, to a certain extent ... but don't ask me.

Regards

Bernard

[1] http://www.simongrant.org/home.html.
[2] http://www.cogx.com/?si=urn:cogx:resource:swg

*Bernard Vatant*

Knowledge Engineering

*Mondeca **
*3, cité Nollez 75018 Paris France

Tel. +33 (0) 871 488 459 

Mail: bernard.vatant at mondeca.com <mailto:bernard.vatant at mondeca.com>

Web: www.mondeca.com <http://www.mondeca.com>

Blog : universimmedia.blogspot.com <http://universimmedia.blogspot.com>



Simon Grant a écrit :
> Hello again.
>
> I think I'm starting to see how to convey where I am on this kind of 
> question - so I'm replying to myself (may I be forgiven... )
>
> For me, it is really very little to do with formality, and certainly 
> nothing to do with formal logic (though I have nothing against formal 
> logic). Where I come to Topic Maps from is from seeing that the TM 
> approach is more *humanly* reasonable than, say, just RDF.
> (Not that I know anything significant at all about RDF.) I approach 
> these matters partly from the perspective of human-computer 
> interaction, and partly from cognitive science - how do we represent 
> things in ways that are most closely aligned with human thinking, and 
> therefore most easily understood by humans?
>
> So really, what I would be interested in knowing is, how many people 
> around here are interested primarily in semantics and human 
> comprehensibility of TMs, and would like (for instance) to explore the 
> ways of using TMs to represent human knowledge in ways that *feel* 
> most comfortable to the people involved. My guess is that the majority 
> here are interested in the formalities, the logic, the proofs - maybe 
> in something close to mathematical elegance. Again, I have nothing 
> against that in itself. Just that, for pragmatic applications, for 
> communication, it is really useful to have representations that are as 
> intuitive as possible. That is a different kind of constraint to the 
> set of formal and logical ones.
>
> Is there anywhere else where people of the kind I am talking about 
> hang out?
>
> Thanks
>
> Simon
>
> At 06:29 2006-06-05, Simon Grant wrote:
>> I'm not (yet :-) ) an expert on Topic Maps but I do have some of the 
>> same concerns.
>> I expect to be considering how TM can play a part in e-portfolio 
>> systems.
>> To me, it depends on the semantic role of temporality.
>>
>> In an e-portfolio setting, we will need to deal with all kinds of 
>> records stored "out there" on various servers (who knows - blogs, 
>> social software, whatever). Because it seems unnecessary and perhaps 
>> undesirable to duplicate these records within a Topic Maps system, 
>> perhaps they are best seen as occurrences - resources - rather than 
>> topics. I don't know what sufficient reasons would be to motivate 
>> representing any occurrences as topics in their own right.
>>
>> Perhaps one can distinguish two kinds of temporal "metadata" (though 
>> I use that word with great caution) or attribute. One is 
>> fundamentally inherent to what is recorded. In the case of a record 
>> of an action, for example, the start and finish times/dates are 
>> clearly to me inherent in the action. The other kind of attribute 
>> could be seen as a superstructure or overlay of personal 
>> significance. This would be of the type that a certain action (etc) 
>> is significant as evidence towards something I want to share - say my 
>> ability as a Topic Maps analyst. I see that as *not* inherent in the 
>> record itself, and ideal for representing with TM.
>>
>> The confusing case - here is the semantic difference - would come if 
>> I were, for instance, a historian. I might have a particular interest 
>> in "The 17th Century" (or, equivalently, the years 1600 - 1700). This 
>> would be best represented as a topic, so that I can work it in to my 
>> structures of personal significance.
>>
>> This brings me on to another angle. It may be of interest to me to 
>> represent all kinds of things as topics of personal interest, but 
>> alone, that remains a lonely situation. If my topics are either to be 
>> shared with others meaningfully, or (perhaps even more likely) to 
>> originate from a pool of common, shared meaning, then it would be 
>> futile to have any hour of any day of any year as a topic. The topics 
>> would not coincide enough to be of use or help or even interest. It's 
>> a little like the threshold for getting into Wikipedia.
>>
>> In summary, I'm saying that my current view is that temporality will 
>> be a record-centric attribute in most situations that I can think of, 
>> much like location. But when a particular time period is the focus of 
>> common, or potentially shared, interest, it might well be worth 
>> representing a time period (or occasionally a moment, like the moment 
>> you heard that Princess Diana had died) as a topic.
>>
>> I hope this makes some sense to you more experienced TMers.
>>
>> Simon
>
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