[sc34wg3] occurrence - basename fuzzy border

[Steve Pepper]

At 11:21 19.02.2003 +0000, Ann Wrightson wrote:
>IMO this as stated is a new concept, and should be judged as such. As 
>Murray points out, it is not supported as such in XTM. If (but only if) 
>that is enough to kill it, then let it be dead.

This wasn't enough to kill typed names, so maybe we should look for better 
arguments :)

>For my part, I had assumed (without much thought) that the underlying 
>requirement would be met by a use of scope - since it seems reasonable to 
>me that an occurrence of a topic could be characterized as having that 
>"context of validity" in which it was usable/visible/accessible...

This argument could also have been used for not having variant names.

What we would lose without variant names would be knowledge of the 
relationship between the base name and the variant name. The same applies 
to occurrences: If an occurrence of type "flag" for the topic "Italy" 
exists in two different resolutions, then surely there exists an implicit 
relationship between them that is lost without the notion of variant 
occurrences?

The other, more conceptual, argument for variant occurrences is that if 
names are merely a specialization of occurrences, then they shouldn't have 
any additional properties that are not essential to their specialization. I 
don't see the ability to have variants as being the key thing that 
distinguishes names from occurrences. What distinguishes them is the 
semantic of providing a useful label for humans.

Steve

--
Steve Pepper, Chief Executive Officer <pepper@ontopia.net>
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34/WG3  Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps)
Ontopia AS, Waldemar Thranes gt. 98, N-0175 Oslo, Norway.
http://www.ontopia.net/ phone: +47-23233080 GSM: +47-90827246