[sc34wg3] SAM-issue term-scope-def

[Bernard Vatant]

Graham

I'm glad we share positions on that. The way you extend the debate reminds me of the very
short exchange we had a month ago on topicmapmail about "source" of associations. What I
proposed first at the time, which was very silly indeed, was adding a "source" attribute
to associations, but in fact it was going no more no less along the same lines than scope,
"source" being just a subtype of "scope".
What you and others said rightly at the time is that the proper way to deal with that is
to attach "source" to the reified association, either as an occurrence, or by
"assertion-source" association. The same argument holds for scope, so we come to the same
conclusion indeed ...

More comments below:

> I think this is effectively what I said in my small paper on Is Scope Bogus?

Is that paper available on-line somewhere?

> I would like us to try and get some consensus on this idea and put something into the
spec to reflect this.

I would applaud to that - the only thing I can do, until France come back to sc34 ...
still a long way to go :((

> I dont think we need to ditch scope just make it very clear that its a sloopy way to
work.
> I think we do this by defining something like the scope assoc example bernard provided
> and say 'this is what scope is, but as you can see its not very expressive'.
> Users of topics maps will then have all the info about whats really going on
> and if they want fairly useless bags of topics then fine, if not we'll have much better
maps.

It figures we would keep scope there just for backward compatibility, but provide and
recommend more effective and semantic ways to deal with what scope wants to express,
through association reification process. If we provide something robust and effective, I
suppose old-fashioned non-specified scope would die out slowly by itself, the same way I
don't think many people use association members with no role specification, although they
are allowed to do so by the standard.

> I also think this goes hand in hand with ditching the topic naming constraint
> as a MUST do and introducing typed names instead of scoped names.

Agreed.

Bernard

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Bernard Vatant
Consultant - Mondeca
www.mondeca.com
Chair - OASIS TM PubSubj Technical Committee
www.oasis-open.org/committees/tm-pubsubj/
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