Martin Bryan

Scoped Occurrences (12)

• ISO 13250 specifically states that the subject identify "may or may not be machine-interpretable, or may or may not be online". As noted above, it can also be "inferred from the topic?s characteristics." Therefore SAM should not confuse subject and resource as they are clearly two different things. (subject-vs-resource)
• To fully represent ISO 13250 Topic Maps SAM must allow for locators that do not address information resources. (locator-reference)
• ISO 13250 deliberately allows subject identity to be "inferred from the topic's characteristics." SAM does not seem to allow for this. (subject-identity-establish)
• ISO 13250 does not recognize the "occurrence" default type introduced for XTM. If this is imposed on the standard, then a means of clearly distinguishing default types from user-defined types needs to be added to the model so that imposed subjects specific to the management of the model can be distinguished from the subjects that the author specified as part of the Topic Map. (xtm-def-occurrence-type)
• Re "Does it represent that storage location" the answer must be no. What if the address is reassigned to different hardware containing a copy of the referenced resource? What if the address is notational, as in the above example? What if there are multiple copies of a particular resource (whether notational or not, as per retrieval from caches rather than the original resource)? This must be left an open issue for applications to determine. (term-subject-address-def)
• It should be possible to create topics that represent strings. I might want to create a topic that refers to all occurrences of the string XML (strings-as-subjects)
• Normalization Form C should be adopted in conformance with W3C rules for XML. (string-normalization)
• the name [label] would be a distinct improvement. (prop-value)
• Given the possible multiple types of schema/DTD for Topic Maps based on ISO 13250 architectural forms, SAM should record the source of this information. (prop-schema)
• Referring to RFC 2396 is likely to only be relevant for a short while. Already IETF have published a draft on Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRI) that may well replace this specification in the longer term. The requirement that all other values must begin with ?x-? is unsupportable given that IRI might be needed in place of URI by the time SAM is published by ISO. (prop-notation-interp)
• The concept of theme was deliberately introduced into ISO 13250 to avoid the ambiguity that occurred when the word topics was used to describe the set of referenced topic map concepts used to scope an item. Dropping this term is likely to lead to ambiguities within SAM. (term-theme)
• The requirement that variant names be associated with specific base names is incorrect. A topic with more than one base name would have to repeat the variants associated with that base name for each base name. (This was a deliberate design feature of ISO 13250 as it was realised that the same symbol could be used for a topic which had been assigned multiple base names, either as synonyms or as language-specific versions.) (variant-in-basename)