[topicmapmail] Merging associations

[Lars Heuer]

Hi Murray,

[...]
> I suspect your scenario is potentially in error. Generally speaking,
> you'll be copying entire Topic Maps, not just an Association. As in

Yes. I misinterpreted Jorils and your request. I thought you both
wanted to take an association from topic map A and copy it to topic
map B *without* merging both topic maps. That's the reason why I said,
that it is difficult and the algorithm does not know where to stop.

> the recent discussion, explicitly-available Topics will already have
> been merged, so Associations between those Topics are not much of an
> issue -- you just link them up. The question is more about what
> happens to Associations that don't already point to local Topics. So

IMO this is an implementation specific detail. TMAPI only knows
org.tmapi.core.Topic. If an implementation provides something like a
'remote' Topic implementation, this 'remote' Topic implementation has
to be resolved transpartely for the user.

[...]
> but let's say that the "Dog" topic is not a local reference:

>        <member>
>          <topicRef
>    
> xlink:href="http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/vocab/biology-vocab.html#Dog" />
>        </member>

I think 99,99999% (maybe more) of the TMAPI implementations will
convert it into a 'local' topic. If a topic with the item identifier
or subject identifier
"http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/vocab/biology-vocab.html#Dog" exists in the
topic map, that topic will be used. If it does not exist, a topic with
the value as item identifier is created.

Anyway, I cannot see that a mergeAssociation(Association) method makes
sense in TMAPI (because TMAPI is the user perspective).

Best regards,
Lars
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