[sc34wg3] SAM-issue term-scope-def

[Martin Bryan]

Lars Marius

> In ISO 13250 the definition of scope says that scope is the union of
> the themes. That is,
>
>   [finland = "Finland" / norwegian swedish]
>
> means that the name "Finland" is valid in Norwegian and that it is
> also valid in Swedish.

A change from the 13250 definition of "a given scope is the union of the
sujects of the set of themes used to specify the scope" to one where the
intersection is used would be a mistake.

The use of "all of the topics in a topic map" as the definition of a
unconstrained scope was a clear recognition of the fact that any of the
currently defined topics could, at some stage, be used to scope any other
topic.

What I would suggest is that we should have said that  unconstrained scope
was the union of all topics currently used as scopes. Yet no one seems to
have listed this as a possible alternative definition.

Martin Bryan