[sc34wg3] Topics and Subjects clarification

[Bernard Vatant]

*Nikita
> | So, I am a subject? Hmmm...
> | I think that a subject is a mental proxy for an individual.
> | And a topic is a computer proxy for a subject.
> | So I am neither a subject nor a topic.
> | However my subject is an instance of a subject
> | and my topic is an instance of a topic.

Agreed completely.

*Lars Marius
> I think this is a philosophical point of view that might have some
> validity, but it doesn't fit very well with how topic maps have been
> defined up to this point.

Why? Nikita's viewpoint seems to me completely "orthodox" in Topic Maps paradigm - at
least as I always understood it.

*Lars Marius
> So far topic maps have said topics represent
> subjects, and subjects are real-world things.

I disagree completely with the assertion "subjects are real-world things". It is
restrictive, misleading and metaphysically biased, in the sense that it supposes that
real-world is divided into things *before* we speak about them, which is obviously wrong.
Definition of things is always ad hoc, arbitrary, and - in best cases - agreed upon in a
community through provisional consensus. In the worse and most frequent cases,
disagreement triggers religious wars. And BTW those wars are triggered exactly because
people confuse their subjects of conversation with real-world eternal absolute things :o)
Main tool to agree on how to divide the world into those arbitrary "things" is
conversation, that's why I always insisted that subjects are strictly speaking "subjects
of conversation" - they are created, agreed upon and maintained through conversation.

So we have to distinguish clearly those three levels

1 : Real world, whatever that means - and we really should not care
2 : Subjects (of conversation)
3 : Topics that formally represent subjects

Topic Maps deal mainly with 3. They indicate also how the representation process is made,
so they deal with the link between 2 and 3. But they don't deal with the structure of 2
itself, and not at all with the link between 1 and 2, and even less with 1.

Bernard