[sc34wg3] SAM-issue term-scope-def

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Bernard Vatant
| 
| The comparison Kal made with <instanceOf> is good. Scope as is it
| now could be understood as a convenient shortcut for something that
| could be expressed in more specific ways.

I agree, and I have been thinking the same for a while. It seems to me
that what we most of all need is more experience with it.
 
| Well. I think I should start another thread on that difference
| between scope type and scope role.  If we go towards refining the
| notion of scope, it's very important IMO.

Sounds good to me. Note that this issue already exists in the SAM,
since it was raised by Ann earlier.

<URL: http://www.ontopia.net/omnigator/models/topic_complete.jsp?tm=tm-standards.xtm&id=525 >
 
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| What we were discussing was whether scope is the intersection of its
| themes, the union, or simply unspecified.
 
* Bernard Vatant
|
| As I tried to explain in my first post on that, the issue is
| certainly undecidable in the present state of scope, because any
| decision has to rely on the semantics of the scoping association.
| So, default of semantics, the answer is "unspecified".  I've
| suggested a way to decide it when roles in the scoping association
| are specified (union for the same role, intersection otherwise)

That is a reasonable point of view, I think. It would be useful to
know what others think, however. Two people who don't really agree is
hardly a consensus. :)
 
| The roadmap it seems could be:
| 
| 1. Precise that scope, as it were, is a simple but poor-semantics
| process of specifying context of validity, but that it's up to
| applications to decide how they deal with it, because the very lack
| of semantics does not allow to set general rules for merging.

I don't think that is enough, unfortunately. We must have specific
merging rules (XTM 1.0 had something like it, so SAM should be able to
as well), and I think we need to resolve this so that TMQL and TMCL
can have scope operators that work as we expect them to.
 
| 2. Propose an extended and backward-compatible way to refine the
| scope semantics, e.g. by expliciting the scoping association, and
| the roles of each scoping topic.
|
| It could seem reasonable to finish with 1. and cast it in the
| standard, and proceed to further reflection on 2.

For a different value of 1., yes.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >