Re: TMDM and merging associations

Robert,

On Fri, 2010-09-17 at 08:24 +0200, Robert Barta wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 10:10:39AM +0200, Steve Pepper wrote:
> 
> > I (personally) believe there will come a time, as topic maps become
> > more and more complex, when users will start to feel the need to --
> > and see the advantage of being able to -- talk about a particular
> > subject from the (restricted) perspective of its relationship to
> > some other subject.
> 
> The time and need for *this* (if I interpret that correctly) is
> already here, and has been for some time. It has been approached
> by pretty much all post-modern languages in form of "traits"
> 
>   trait isa language-feature
>     wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trait_(computer_science)
> 
> How to connect this to topic map roles is left as exercise for the
> reader ;-)
> 

Well, one way:


> If a c-node serves as the C endpoint of a Cx arc, then its subject is
> the playing of a specific role type by a specific subject in a
> specific relationship. 

3.5.1.4.3.1 in http://www.isotopicmaps.org/rm4tm/RM4TM-1.0.html

Granting that the text needs some serious cleaning and avoidance of the
"play nice together" restrictions. Legends should play well with others
but how to accomplish that is a legend-specific (or class of legends)
choice.

The method of representing a subject in relationship with another
subject in this early draft, is one way to represent such a
relationship.

Inventive minds will come up with others and that's fine.

Hope you are looking forward to a great weekend!

Patrick

PS: Are you anticipating that traits as described in
http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~black/publications/TR_CSE_02-012.pdf, would be
used to compose identifiers by specifying parts of an identifier by
separate properties rather than a single identifier? And then declaring
the separate properties to function as a single identifier? 

PPS: I don't have a cold but you can kiss Lars Heuer for me. ;-)