[sc34wg3] What do we mean by reification?

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Patrick Durusau
| 
| So I have a subject, the topic map construct and I have a
| topic. What I am missing is what is being gained by saying that is
| reification versuse the more usual case of subjects and topics being
| a relationship (in SAM terms)? Or perhaps better, what is lost by
| saying both are reification?

I think we lose some clarity. If you tell people that a topic
represents a subject they will immediately understand what you mean.
If you tell them the topic reifies the subject you will have to
explain what you mean by it, but you haven't gained anything by making
things harder.  The simple word "representation" expresses equally
well what is going on.

Further, reification is not used in the AI community the way we have
used it in ISO 13250:2000/XTM 1.0. For example, Russell & Norvig say

  "Reification is the process of turning a predicate or function into
  an object in the language."

This corresponds to what the SAM calls reification, which is basically
a special case of the topic-represents-subject scenario, which I think
we do need a special term for, and here we have one that was designed
to say just this.

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