[topicmapmail] PSIs - alternatives

[Simon Grant]

After having a good introduction to practical TMs, courtesy of 
Ontopia, there are a few things where the rationale puzzles me, and 
I'd like to check the ideas out with the community. Here is the first.

PSIs. Have people considered the idea of not trying to have unique 
PSIs, but instead having a group of PSIs refer to each other, when 
their sponsors consider that they are equivalent?

There could be a impartial host for PSIs - maybe topicmaps.org? - 
respected by the entire community. That might work, if it were open 
for everyone to put them in freely or for a small fee. But if that 
doesn't happen, if two or more organisations decide they need PSIs on 
the same topics, how can anyone decide between them rationally?

A "democratic" alternative would be to have PSIs resolving to a file 
that named other, equivalent, PSIs, along with a description of the 
subject as seen by that authority. Maybe near-equivalents could also 
be included as such, but not just any related subjects. This should 
result in a highly resilient set of equivalent PSIs which would be 
proof against any one of them going down. It would be up to the user 
community to decide which ones to use in their topic maps, but it 
would not matter. In a declaration in a topic map one could name a 
few of the equivalents together.

A standard for PSI files could include this idea.

Seems to me like a win-win - but I'd be interested to hear of 
arguments to the contrary.

Simon

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