[sc34wg3] Question on TNC / Montreal minutes

[Marc de Graauw]

* Lars

| You should be aware, however, that many
| of the applications I have written do merging based on names. I still
| don't think having that behaviour in the standard is right.

But you never say WHY it should not be in the standard. Your position is - if
I understand you correctly - top put merging based on name, occurrence,
association in TMCL, not the SAM. But what's wrong with doing this in the SAM?
Why is it correct to describe merging based on subject identity in the SAM,
but not so for name-based merging?

* Marc

| | So the subject identity is redundant: the name plus the TNC already
| | establishes subject identity. This applies not only to this example,
| | but to every case of a controlled vocabulary with unique names. Note
| | that in such vocabularies things as string matching are usually not
| | going to cause much trouble, since those vocabularies are well
| | defined. There is one big advantage names have over subject
| | indicators: names are human readable, subject indicators are not (by
| | most humans).

* Lars

| When I first read this I thought you were arguing that merging by URI
| should be taken out of the standard entirely, and I have to say I have
| rarely felt so discouraged in a topic map standard discussion.

Apologies for being unclear, but I most certainly did not mean that. I argued
merging by URI should not be used in the specific example I gave, but I never
said (and do not think) it should be dropped.

Marc