[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
- From: "W. Eliot Kimber" <eliot@dns.isogen.com>
- To: "XML Dev" <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 10:28:01 -0500
At 05:16 PM 9/30/98 +0200, Michel Biezunski wrote:
>
>[Eliot:]
>
>>As an aside, I note that much of this discussion revolves around issues of
>>the definitions of key terms in the discussion, which is, of course, one of
>>the purposes of topic navigation maps: to define things.
>
>
>Topic Navigation Maps do ***_NOT_**** define things. They (only!) offer a
means
>of interchanging whatever somebody says about something, including
definitions,
>if any. They can be used even when no definitions are involved.
But doesn't the act of associating a name with mentions of that name (a
topic to its members) serve to define what the topic means to the creator
of the topic?
As I have always understood topic maps, they serve to relate topics. A
topic is a named idea that is an opinion about some thing. I can't talk
about a thing until I define what I mean by that thing, which is what a
topic does.
For example, if I create the topic "Lake Geneva" and connect it to the
latitude and longitude of a body of water in Switzerland, I have defined
what I mean by "Lake Geneva" in the context of this particular topic map.
Cheers,
E.
--
<Address HyTime=bibloc>
W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer
ISOGEN International Corp.
2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 75202. 214.953.0004
www.isogen.com
</Address>
xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)
|