[sc34wg3] Documenting merging rules in TMDM

[Steve Pepper]

* Kal:
| It seems to me that this kind of functionality could be done as part of
| TMCL. I am thinking that there could be constraints such as if X is true
| of topic A and Y is true of topic B then topic A and topic B must be
| merged.
| 
| If TMCL does indeed build on TMQL then I think that we would end up with
| a highly expressive language not only for constraining topic maps but
| also for prescribing merging rules.

I agree that this would be one sensible approach -- and from
Patrick's reply it is possible to infer that he would find
this at least more acceptable than having the logic buried
in the application.

So I think one important question the US National Body should
answer is whether they believe that the facility for documenting
merging rules has to be part of 13250 (and if so, why), or could
it be part of ISO 19756 -- TMCL or ISO 18048 -- TMQL.

| I am thinking that there could be constraints such as if X is true
| of topic A and Y is true of topic B then topic A and topic B must be
| merged.

Hmm. This seems like a different use case than the ones I posted.
Mine all equate to "if X is true of both A and B". Can you give
a concrete example where you would need Y as well?

Steve

--
Steve Pepper <pepper@ontopia.net>
Chief Strategy Officer, Ontopia
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3
Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps 1.0)