xml-dev - Re: Services-based automation (WAS RE: Realistic proposals to the W3C?)

[Martin Bryan <mtbryan@sgml.u-net.com>]

Ronald
 
> Martin Bryan wrote:
> > 
> > (Unfortunately, despite many years of screaming on my part,
> > Topic Maps fail to require you to record the meaning of the term!!)
> 
> Having just (perhaps justifiably -- I'm a bit naive in this field) been
> taken to task for assuming that semantics implies the ability to
> automagically determine meaning at the machine level, can I ask what you
> mean here? Is this a human-readable description of each term?
> Machine-readable? And do such descriptions bring anything to the actual
> processing of a topic map or is it just to help the programmer at design
> time?

The names assigned to topics are like the words in a dictionary. They can have multiple interpretations. (Try looking up Run in the Oxford English Dictionary to see what I mean.) Unless you unambiguously reference which of the possible meanings you mean then the name is meaningless. So you really do need to be able to associate a definition with each name. (There could be more than one, just as there could be more than one name, as each language/culture/domain could have its own definition, which may or may not be exact subsets of each other.)

Don't bring machine understanding into this. The furthest the machine can go is recognize equivalences between names. What the definitions do is allow humans to disambiguate between potentially ambiguous names. (Think of them as a help file for the name.)

Martin Bryan