[sc34wg3] a new name for the Reference Model

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Steven R. Newcomb
| 
| No, I don't.  That's why I think we should leave the scope of 13250
| exactly where it is: 2 interchange syntaxes for Topic Maps, and not
| a multi-part standard. That way, when we tell people to look at it,
| they get a nice, friendly, self-contained, BRIEF introduction, and
| no more.  They can also skip straight to the DTDs, as you, I, and
| many others would normally do.

If we do this we get an incomplete standard where the meaning of the
syntaxes is not defined in any real way, nor will the conformance
specifications be complete. I think what you are doing here is to blur
the boundary between an educational text and a standard.

That standard will either have no conformance clause (impossible, I
think), or it will consider XTM/HyTM instances to be conformant that
the real standard (SAM + deserialization specs) will not consider to
be conformant. I'm not sure we can live with that.

Think seriously about this: of what use is a "standard" that cannot
answer basic questions like "can a facet apply to a topic?", "what is
the allowed structure of a superclass/subclass association?", "can
association roles be reified?", "do display names inherit the scope of
the corresponding base name?", and so on?

| Later, when/if they have deeper questions, they can discover the SAM
| and the RM.  13250 can make discreet normative references to them,
| in order to let its readers find answers to deeper questions.  If
| they want the answers to deeper questions, we've already persuaded
| them, and the existence of such depth will only increase their
| comfort level and further encourage adoption of Topic Maps by them.

Why do we have to create this problem for ourselves?

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