[sc34wg3] New syntax for (binary) associations

[Robert Barta]

On Sun, Feb 03, 2008 at 01:17:41PM +0100, Steve Pepper wrote:
> What we need is the ability to say that in a particular context,
> role type X (say, employee) is to be regarded as the "subject",
> and role type Y (say, employer) is to be regarded as the
> "object".

Ok, I thought that in CTM "templates" can do these kinds of thing:

    works-for ($person, $organisation) :-
       is-employed-by (employee : $person,
                       employer : $organisation)
    .

What I still find nice about the templates (although they come with
other problems), is that they are _NOT_ restricted just to the
use-case you have outlined above. They can take care of

  - default values
  - creating more than just assocs, but also whole fragments

> The same mechanism could in theory be used to annotate
> an ontology in order to support automated translation to RDF.
> So instead of tm:subject and tm:object we need something like
> tm:subject-role and tm:object-role.

!! HACK-ATTACK. HACK-ATTACK. HACK-ATTACK. !!

Sorry, here on my desk just the red warning light went nuts. ;-)

If I wanted to *decently* convert a topic map into an RDF graph, then
this is not

  "just treat assoc types as predicates and paste somehow a subject
   and an object to them"

\rho