[sc34wg3] Question on TNC / Montreal minutes

[Patrick Durusau]

Steve,

Let me see if I can say it back and you can tell me if I am closer to 
the problem:

Steve Pepper wrote:

> At 15:57 13/09/02 -0400, Patrick Durusau wrote:
>
>> Steve Pepper wrote: 
>
<snip>

>
>> If I am reading the example correctly, I am still missing the....Ah, 
>> are you saying that the '"table /english' must apply only within the 
>> scope (sorry no other word comes to mind) of language specific naming 
>> of the term table and not to the term table in the larger topic map? 
>> Such that at present, we have confusion between the operation of 
>> scope on '"table" /english' and a scope applied to the term table? 
>> Interesting. Is that a problem of syntax or understanding of the 
>> operation of scope? (Or both?)
>
>
> 'Yes' to the first part of this paragraph; 'not sure' to the rest.
>
> We might have another topic, whose subject is "table (the device used 
> to display data)":
>
>   [table2 = "table" /english
>           = "tabell" /norwegian ]
>
> Again, we are just using scope to allow applications to choose the 
> most pertinent name for the topic in the given language context, not 
> to enable applications to unambiguously look up a single topic within 
> some name space. If I'd wanted to do the latter, I would have had to 
> use different scopes, e.g.:
>
>   [table  = "table" /furniture ]
>   [table2 = "table" /math ]
>
> (Note: The scopes "furniture" and "math" were chosen without a lot of 
> deliberation. I could have used any number of other scopes for the 
> same purpose, perhaps "carpentry" and "information". The very 
> arbitrariness of such choices is also one of the problems with the TNC 
> and why it doesn't achieve the goal that its adherents have set for 
> it, namely to permit the unambiguous look up of topics by name.) 

What you are saying is: 1. baseName unique in topic space (meaningful in 
terms topic map syntax), versus 2. baseName in some other space, such as 
language (leaving aside the shared characteristic that this would also 
be meaningful in topic map syntax to illustrate the problem).  And the 
problem is the inability, at least in the example as shown, to 
disambiguate between the two uses?

Patrick


-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
pdurusau@emory.edu