[sc34wg3] TMQL Tutorial (Preview)

[Steve Pepper]

* Robert Barta
|
| Lars and /me have worked on a first tutorial on how TMQL could look
| like. It is currently staged (inofficially) at
| 
|    http://topicmaps.it.bond.edu.au/docs/39?style=printable
| 
| and will be officially published some time later.

This looks like a very accessible introduction. I haven't read the
whole thing yet, but I have one immediate comment:

Under "Identifying Things" you use the URN "urn:x-ASIN:B0006399FS"
as an example of a subject locator (used as an identifier for the
album "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb").

This does not accord with my view of what a subject locator is. I
thought there was broad consensus in the community that a subject
locator is the locator (or address) of a subject; that resolving
a subject locator returns the subject itself; and that subject
locators can therefore only be used as identifiers for (network-
retrievable) information resources.

The current draft of the TMDM is pretty clear on this, at least in
the glossary (http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0588.pdf):

  3.24 subject locator
  a locator that refers to the information resource that is the
  subject of a topic. The topic thus represents that particular
  information resource; i.e. the information resource is the
  subject of the topic.

  3.8 information resource
  a resource that can be represented as a sequence of bytes, and
  thus could potentially be retrieved over a network

By this definition, the album "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" is
not an information resource and therefore cannot be identified by
a subject locator.

I suggest your example use a web page about the album instead (e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Dismantle_an_Atomic_Bomb).

Steve