[sc34wg3] Question on TNC / Montreal minutes

[Martin Bryan]

Mary wrote
>So I think
> that the baseName should have an occurrence of  0 or 1. There should never
> be more than one sting identifier (different from the URI). AN ISBN comes
> to mind but there are others.

I must object to this suggestion, as it makes it extremely difficult to
assign multilingual identifiers to a topic. No single language should be
privileged in naming topics. Treating different languages as variants does
not help: it tends to reinforce the single language concept bacause it means
that merging can only take place when topics have been described in the same
language (in my view a highly undesirable feature). We need to ensure that
topic maps in different languages can be merged as far as possible. Only by
allowing multiple baseNames for a topic will this be possible. (But we must
always remember that there are some names that work for many languages!)

Martin Bryan