[sc34wg3] Supporting variants in TMCL

[Steve Pepper]

* Motomu Naito
|
| On behalf of non-SAE, I greatly appreciate your effort.

:-)

| >   NAMES of type "foo" belonging to
| >    TOPICS of type "bar" can or must have (one or more)
| >     VARIANTS in the scope "baz"
| >
| > In other words, we need to be able to constrain every variant 
| > statement on the basis, not of its type, but of what type of name
| > it is a variant of (and what type of topic that belongs to).
| >
| > Naito-san: Would that satisfy your requirements?
| 
| In the case of
| http://www.infoloom.com/pipermail/topicmapmail/2009q2/007497.html,
| if I can constrain variants according to type of NAMES, type of TOPIC and
| type of SCOPE, it meets my requirement I think.

Do you really mean *type* of SCOPE?

This would seem to imply a different answer to Lars Marius' question than the
one I gave him earlier today. He asked:

| Is "baz" here a topic type, the way it is in nearly all other
| constraints (except scope-required-constraint), or is it an instance
| (as in scope-required-constraint)? In other words, is the requirement
| that the variant contain the topic "baz" in its scope, or that it
| contain an instance of "baz"?

I answered that "baz" is an instance, not a topic type. Your formulation
suggests that all you need is the ability to specify the topic type, but I don't
think you mean that.

Looking at your example, it seems to me that you need to be able to say, for
example, that names of type 'alias' belonging to topics of type 'person' must
have one variant in the scope 'Hiragana, Reading' and one variant in the scope
'Romaji, Reading'.

In this case, 'Hiragana', 'Romaji' and 'Reading' would not be topic *types*. The
first two might be instances of the type 'Writing system'. (I'm not sure what
'Reading' would be an instance of.) In any case, you clearly need to be able to
specify the variant's scope in terms of the actual scoping topics, not their
types.

Best regards,

Steve