Range of Application

Greetings!

Since I hinted that prior discussion would help us be productive in the 
teleconference, I took that to apply to myself as well. ;-)

In Bernard's post of 31 Oct 2003, he refers to the psdoc.htm (which can 
now be found at:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/876/psdoc.htm), as a 
good starting point for discussion of a deliverable he termed "Published 
Subjects Documentation - General Definitions."

I have a question about the range of applicability of that deliverable.

It is noted in the Scope and Purpose Statement of that document that:

> The first and main target of this recommendation is therefore topic
> maps interoperability, through efficient definition and identification
> of subjects represented by topics in topic maps.
> 
> This initial target is likely to be extended in the future to a wide
> range of applications or technologies making explicit use of abstract
> representations of subjects. Those include for example applications
> leveraging ontologies or vocabularies, search engines, intelligent
> agents, and other foreseeable or yet unknown Semantic Web
> tools. Throughout the present document, the generic term applications
> is used to refer to either topic maps applications or any other such
> technologies.

In terms of definitions, while we may favor topic maps by using familiar 
terms (to people in the topic map community), is there any reason to 
think such definitions will not be equally applicable to any other 
application or technology?

What I am thinking is that the definitions should be as generic to the 
general concept of PSIs as possible so as to allow for future 
deliverables to address the needs to topic maps and other technologies 
(or the development of deliverables by other communities for their own 
purposes).

Not a major point but one that I would prefer to have clear at the outset.

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature

Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model

Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!