[sc34wg3] Contribution to GTM (level 0)

[Reidar Bratsberg]

Hi

On 22. feb.. 2009, at 21:01, Rani Pinchuk wrote:

> Hendrik Thomas presented in the TMRA'2008 his nice paper about  
> GTMalpha (see http://www.tmra.de/2008/talks/pdf/137-152.pdf). I  
> think that this suggestion can be an excellent basis for the  
> standard. However, I would like to suggest some changes in it. The  
> main change is described in the attached text.


As I understand your suggestion, you propose to replace the notation  
from the TMRA08-paper?

Maybe this form could be an optional "short-hand" -- to be used for  
clarity when necessary, and the original form could be used to  
emphasize the actual constructs in the topic map?

I agree with your rationale, both in making the semantic meaning (that  
is currently under discussion) clearer, and to reduce the graphical  
noise from many many lines, elipses, boxes etc.  Still, in many use  
cases, it would be handy to make it very clear what is a topic and  
what is not.

Another point:  In the original paper, you can have boxes inside  
topics that allow you to refer to them by number, to split up the  
figure. I guess this should also be possible in your proposed form.   
(I suggested to Hendrik Thomas in Leipzig an alternative way of  
drawing this, where you just divide the elipse with a vertical line  
and put the reference in one part -- to reduce clutter. I would prefer  
a "graphically small" way of doing this.).  In any case, a way to put  
short references to other topics would be great to make references to  
other parts of a topic map.

Also, I wonder if there's a typo in figure 6 in the attachment:  
Shouldn't "abbreviation" be in brackets: "(abbreviation)", since it's  
a scoping topic?

Best,
Reidar

-- 
Reidar Bratsberg, Ravn Webveveriet AS
reidar at ravn.no,  http://www.ravn.no