Re: Dynamic vs. Fixed World Views was Re: MARCXML to Topic Maps? MODS to Topic Maps?

Hi Patrick,

[...]
> Reflecting my personal preferences as any "subject recognizer" reflects
> its creator's preferences, it "chooses" to say this is an occurrence (in
> the topic map sense) of the topic "Ex nihilo" that has the subject 
> identifier, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_nihilo.

Well, I liked your pragmatic approach since I am a pragmatic person,
but now I think Alexander made some disillusioning points. ;)

It is very true that it does not help to create just another container
with mess. The mess wouldn't get any better if it is mapped into Topic
Maps.

Topic Maps excels in identifying subjects but if we have no chance to
identify the subjects in MARC we're lost.

A mapping to occurrences is a possibility, but I wonder if that has
any value. (Someone (Kal?!?) said years ago that occurrences are the
dead ends of Topic Maps. Very true).

Take our discussion: A subject "Patrick" (identified by an e-mail
address) is talking about subjects (MARC, Topic Maps) to other
subjects (identified by e-mail addresses). That makes sense. But if we
simply create topics from each post (with a random identifier) and put
everything into occurrences, we achieved nothing. We can make wild
guesses from the occurrences and NLP may help us a bit, but we
wouldn't recognize the *subjects*.

If we put everything into occurrences, we could also use a full-text
search on top of MARC and we'd have the same result. No need to create a
Topic Maps silo at all.

Best regards,
Lars
-- 
Semagia 
<http://www.semagia.com>

<http://www.topicmaps.de/mailinglist/> German Topic Maps mailing list
<http://tinytim.sourceforge.net/> Open Source Topic Maps engine
<http://mappa.semagia.com/> Mappa - Python Topic Maps engine