Remembering the Future

First I really don't understand on a pragmatic level the distinction you make between information "connected to", "contained inside", or "about" a topic. I've always figured a topic as a binding point, and my maths background tends to make me consider that there is nothing inside a point, so there is nothing (like the) inside of a topic. All the information relevant to a topic (names, roles, occurrences) is somehow "aggregated from outside", the same way information about a point in geometry is "external", like its belonging to such line or surface, its coordinates in such frame and so on. I guess that your philosophical background should make you agree that a topic fundamental nature is emptiness :)) Bernard Vatant I don't think that it is correct to use an occurrence of topic T to express meta data about the topic itself, but that it is perfectly valid to use occurrences to express meta data about the subject that the topic is a proxy for. . . . There are properties that express the subject address and subject indicators of a topic. But the values of those properties are not typed. The [occurrences] property of a topic consists of a sequence of typed values. . . . An occurrence consists of a value (string or locator), a type, and a scope. . . . occurrences are not used to establish identity and there is no mechanism in topic maps for saying "this property establishes identity" and "this property does not". Kal Ahmed, Techquila It just seems to me that the nature of the debate here rests with an underlying thought that an is *not* a . It also seems that, among some of us who created XTM in the first place, that can be a , and that, had we added as an alias for none of this discussion would be happening. Jack Park

# posted by Guy : 8:39 AM