[topicmapmail] Reification and Type Instance

[Thompson, Miles]

Call me a programmer but it occurs to me that the question is
whether you define your association types at a 
high level as being of *type* association-type, or not.

Using your example:

When you state that:

employed-by(lmg : employee, bouvet : employer)

Then you are asserting that there is an
Association which is an instance of 
the 'association type' "employed-by" .

But if 'employed-by' is itself, of type 'association type'
then, after you reify thee statement:

employed-by(lmg : employee, bouvet : employer) ~ lmg-employment 

then, yes, it seems odd, to state that lmg-employment
is of 'type' "employed-by" since it's a topic, not an association type.
(ie a categorical mistake)

--

So the question is, does the TMDM require that all association-types, eg
employed-by be, themselves, of 'type' association-type or is that
optional.

--

You know what, my head hurts, I'm going back into my programmer hole.

Thanks

Miles



> -----Original Message-----
> From: topicmapmail-bounces at infoloom.com [mailto:topicmapmail-
> bounces at infoloom.com] On Behalf Of Lars Marius Garshol
> Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2007 7:01 PM
> To: TopicMapMail
> Subject: Re: [topicmapmail] Reification and Type Instance
> 
> 
> * Robert Cerny
> >
> > I have a question regarding the TMDM: If i reify a typed
> statement, is
> > the resulting topic an instance of the type of the statement?
> 
> This came up a couple of times in ISO meetings, but was never
> really resolved, partly because in the contexts where it came up,
> it didn't need to be.
> 
> But let's try to reason it through, and see where we wind up.
> 
> If I say:
> 
> employed-by(lmg : employee, bouvet : employer) ~ lmg-employment
> 
> then I'm really asserting that the 'lmg-employment' topic
> represents the same thing as the 'employed-by' association. That
> does kind of imply that they should have the same type. It's been
> argued that the statement-type relationship and the type-instance
> (for topics) relationship are different relationships, but I'm
> not sure that matters.
> 
> And if we go on to say
> 
> [lmg-employment : employed-by]
> 
> that does sound kind of funny, but on the other hand another name
> for 'employed-by' is 'employment' and
> 
> [lmg-employment : employment]
> 
> is perfectly fine.
> 
> I can't really find any good reason why it shouldn't be the same
> type. If anyone can I'd be interested to hear it. (Borislav?)
> 
> --
> Lars Marius Garshol                         Mobile: +47 98 21 55
> 50
> Bouvet                                      Office: +47 23 40 60
> 00
> 
> 
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