[sc34wg3] Re: Going beyond SIPs?

[Patrick Durusau]

Robert,

If I can skip to your last example:

> But I can top it. Now I would like to identify as equal all persons
> who are involved in more than 5 associations of type "knows". Slightly
> bizarre, but possible. Or what about "all persons with the same
> distance from G.W. Bush should be regarded equal" (not sure how
> bizarre that is).
> 
> In these cases there is no property involved. Still, a constraint
> language may be able to capture this (or at least parts of this).

You say there is 'no property' involved in the statement "all persons 
with the same distance from G.W. Bush should be regarded as equal."

Not sure how that could be the case and yet have your constraint 
operate? That is to say, each of the persons in question would have to 
possess a property against which the constraint could be applied.

Oh, you mean the statement itself has no property? Well, I suppose that 
is true, but it states the property that is used to determine subject 
sameness.

Interesting. In the TMRM, the definition of an SIP property class of 
necessity states what the subject sameness rule is for that particular 
SIP property class.

So, the TMRM subject sameness rule is what you are calling a constraint. 
  (Noting that a subject sameness rule is not a property of a subject 
proxy.)

Does that work for you?

Since it took 3 hours to get through 1 1/2 pages of the Tau last time, 
at 9 pages, does that mean we need to schedule 18 hours on the Tau for 
XML 2004? ;-)

BTW, thanks for the update on the Tau model. Still reading, slowly, but 
like the precision.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick



Robert Barta wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 02:17:56PM -0400, Patrick Durusau wrote:
> 
>>You have said more than once that the \tau can go beyond SIPs (hard to 
>>think you can go beyond what is already unlimited but the \tau is your 
>>model so your entitled to your opinion).
> 
> 
> Patrick, et.al.
> 
> What some of us are arguing (I think to remember that Dmitry was with
> me here), is that 'properties' alone are just one way to pinpoint the
> identity of a subject.
> 
> Let us reconsider the example with the cities which are "identified"
> by their geographical coordinates. What happens here:
> 
>   - First someone writes a topic (subject proxy, if you wish) about
>     the city 'konstantinopel'. He creates associations around it, such that
>     it borders the Posperus, but also adds X and Y coordinates (and
>     maybe a radius R) to approximate the location of Konstantinopel.
> 
>   - then another topic about Instanbul is added, similar X/Y, similar R
> 
>   - and then another 'Byzantium' is added. Again, similar X/Y, similar R
> 
> Now, as already discussed, "it depends" whether the three topics
> should be identified (= "regarded as equivalent") or not. A historian
> would probably want to see all three of them, or maybe not.
> Obviously, it is unwise to somehow code this equivalence into the map
> itself. It is something which the "application", i.e. the context how
> the map is used, is supposed to define.
> 
> This is where the TMRM concept 'TMA' enters the stage. Here "identity"
> is defined as "whatever topics have a circle, sufficiently congruent
> shall be regarded the same".
> 
> My view is that this is a "constraint": It says "if I had my way, then
> no two topics in a map exist which have a sufficiently congruent
> geographic range".
> 
> There are two questions:
> 
>   (a) what is the formal language (if any) to express this?
> 
>   (b) what must TM software do to make this constraint TRUE, i.e.
>       change the map in such a way that it does not violate the
>       constraint?
> 
> For (b), the answer seems easy: The software must remove all
> situations which would conflict with the constraint. It will detect
> the topics and will - without further control - merge them into
> one. (A query/transformation language could actually put more control
> on how the 'merged' map looks like)
> 
> For (a) the answer is not so simple. Every language has a certain
> degree of expressitivity. The higher that is, the more complex things
> one can express. But the price of this is that at some stage you loose
> the ability to "stay in control". For instance, it may be
> theoretically impossible to always decide whether two constraints are
> effectively saying the same (and are just using a different way to
> do so), or whether two constraints are just contradicting each other
> (making it impossible for maps to satisfy both constraints).
> 
> So this is a thin path to walk.
> 
> ---
> 
> What you guys suggest within TMRM is to consider only properties of
> the subjects in question to be part of such a constraint. This is all
> well and good for many cases like the one above or "all persons having
> the same email address should be regarded the same".
> 
> But it is rather arbitrary. What about the following "constraint":
> 
>   Two "cities" (i.e. this constraint only applies to instances of the
>   concept "city") are to be regarded the same if both are directly or
>   indirectly linked to a geographic item (river, mountain, bay, sea,
>   lake, ...).
> 
> In our case above, all three cities may be linked to the "Posperus",
> so they may be candidates for a merge. Note, that we have left
> completely unspecified the exact nature of linking. This could be
> "is-bordering-at", or "on-the-banks-of".
> 
> Now you could argue that this is still to be done with properties,
> maybe properties which have to be defined ad-hoc-ishly for this very
> purpose.
> 
> But I can top it. Now I would like to identify as equal all persons
> who are involved in more than 5 associations of type "knows". Slightly
> bizarre, but possible. Or what about "all persons with the same
> distance from G.W. Bush should be regarded equal" (not sure how
> bizarre that is).
> 
> In these cases there is no property involved. Still, a constraint
> language may be able to capture this (or at least parts of this).
> 
> --
> 
> I am not saying that a future TMCL should have these features, what I
> am saying is that we should orient ourselves towards the expressivity
> and not an artificial selection of what is going to be compared.
> 
> \rho
> _______________________________________________
> sc34wg3 mailing list
> sc34wg3@isotopicmaps.org
> http://www.isotopicmaps.org/mailman/listinfo/sc34wg3
> 


-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model

Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!