[sc34wg3] a new name for the Reference Model

[Anthony B. Coates]

** Reply to message from Patrick Durusau <pdurusau@emory.edu> on Tue, 31 Dec
2002 05:51:15 -0500

> I don't dispute that the practice of piling words one upon the other is 
> often used in an attempt to confer significance upon a work. What I 
> would dispute is that a title can confer significance on a work that has 
> none. (Pick your own example.) And when a work has significance, as I 
> think the "TM Modeling Principles" does, it has no need of piling up 
> words in the title. Particularly noise words like "Metamodel."

At some age before I started school, my uncle asked me what I wanted to be when
I grow up.  I confidently replied, "A homosexual".  He smiled, because he knew
that I had no idea what it meant, but I simply wanted to use the longest word I
could think of.  However, I'm older now, and I really don't put long words into
titles just for the syllabic glory.  I fully understand that any "metaXXX" word
has a bit of a cringe factor at the moment.

> Personally I would like to see something like: TM Principles. That is 
> partially due to my seeing principles, whether in topic map land or 
> elsewhere, as underlying the expression of all that follows.

However, "TM Principles" would be a misleading title (IMHO), and this is the
core issue that I was getting at.  When I read the document, it doesn't strike
me as primarily laying out a set of principles for topic maps.  What it does,
quite literally, is to describe a metamodel for representing topic map
information in a canonical fashion.  So when I suggested "TM Canonical
Metamodel", it wasn't (only) because I like big words, but because I thought
the title should accurately reflect the contents to someone who hasn't actually
read the document yet.

	Cheers,
		Tony.
====
Anthony B. Coates, Information & Software Architect
mailto:abcoates@TheOffice.net
MDDL Editor (Market Data Definition Language)
http://www.mddl.org/
FpML AWG Member (Financial Products Markup Language)
http://www.fpml.org/