Re: Temporal validitity of subject indicators?

Hi Andrew et al


On 9.5.2011 1:06, Andrew S. Townley wrote:
> Hi Folks,

---snip---

> Fast forward to time t+n, and Bob's goes out of business, the hosting
> company redirects bobsgarage.com to a link farm/advertising page and
> Bob's phone number gets reassigned to something else.  The problem is
> that your topic map (authors and users) don't really have any idea
> that this has happened, so they get new data with these references,
> but the references now indicate different subjects.  At time t+n+1,
> someone discovers that the subject indicator is no longer valid and
> needs to update the map.  You might also just happen to have some old
> data around that needs to either be referenced or used to rebuild the
> map.  Some of that "old data" may also be in the form of serialized
> topic maps.
>
> What do you do?
>
> Ideally, it would be great to have a way to bound the periods of
> validity for a subject indicator to a given subject.  While the
> software may not understand this distinction, at least the humans
> would.  Either way, it gets kinda messy.


I see here a business opportunity for someone, indeed. Now, think this.

You set up a web service that takes topic maps as input, picks up all 
used subject identifiers in the topic map, and stores addressed 
resources to a database with a time and topic map stamp. Now, whenever 
someone uses the topic map (at any time), she could check/download used 
subject indicators from the web service. Apparently, the web service 
would somehow resemble The Wayback Machine of Internet Archive but 
emphasis is on preserving resources that have been used as subject 
indicators.

Also, what might turn very interesting, is the evolution of subjects. If 
this service is used consistently, the service actually stores histories 
of subjects.

Kind Regards,
Aki / Wandora Team



> Cheers,
>
> ast -- Andrew S. Townley<[email protected]> http://atownley.org
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