[sc34wg3] revised draft Reference Model document N0298

[Steve Pepper]

At 10:48 12/04/02 +0200, Bernard Vatant wrote:
>One remark from Patrice - among other ones - the use of "assertion" might 
>be misleading
>for people with background in formal logic.
>Why letting down "association"? What about "statement"?

Any term we use is going to be "misleading" for someone. (Think of all the 
confusion we will cause among bankers if we use the term "statement" :-)

I'm happy with "assertion". It's already been in use a while, albeit 
informally (e.g. in phrases such as "any time we assign a characteristic to 
a topic we are essentially making an assertion about its subject...").

I think it is important *not* to use "association", because from the point 
of view of the SAM, an association is just one kind of assertion (others 
being names and occurrences). We should avoid having a general meaning in 
one model and a specific meaning in another.

Steve

--
Steve Pepper, Chief Executive Officer <pepper@ontopia.net>
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34/WG3  Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps)
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