[sc34wg3] The Norwegian National Body position on ISO 13250

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Patrick Durusau
| 
| [referring to the SAM]
|
| At first blush that appears to leave merging rules up to the
| individual application, which will surely lead to differing results
| when processing the same topic map. 

The SAM provides the minimal merging rules, but explicitly says that
applications are allowed to do *additional* merging as they see fit.
This has been the principle in the standard since ISO 13250:2000 days,
and was known as the principle that human beings were the ultimate
arbiters of subject identity. This text merely carries that a bit
further so that applications which decide that social security numbers
are useful for merging can use them to do so without being in
violation of the text.

So, yes, in one *application* the results of merging can be different
from the results obtained by another *application*, if they add
different rule sets for additional merging. Just like two different
XSLT transformations can give different outputs given the same input
document. 

The point is that the minimal requirements are laid down, and users
are then given freedom to add additional behaviour as they see fit.

That should be OK, shouldn't it?

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >