Public identifiers and topic maps

[Steven R. Newcomb]

> Date: Fri, 25 Sep 1998 17:20:41 -0400
> From: John Cowan <cowan at locke.ccil.org>
> Organization: Lojban Peripheral
> 
> The current draft of ISO/IEC 13250, Topic Navigation Maps (a
> standard architectural form) explicitly takes Steven Newcomb's
> view of the meaning of owner identifiers in FPIs: scarcely surprising,
> since he is one of the editors.
> 
> In particular, clasue 6.1.1 reads in part:
> 
> # [T]he registration indicator, public text class, and language fields
> # are as specified for formal public identifiers in ISO/IEC 8879:1986.
> # The 'topic authority' [the string after the "+//" or "-//"] is
> # the owner of <em>the information resource</em> that defines the
> # concept.  [Emphasis added.]
> 
> SGML tribal elders (a set which I am not a member of) may wish to
> protest this language and similar language elsewhere in the draft
> before it becomes hard-coded in an ISO standard.

Yes.  John has done some homework and he has discovered why I brought
this matter up in this forum: in general I think it's better to get
consensus *before* a standard is published.  Several luminaries have
now argued in this forum against the FPI-based methodology we have
proposed in the Topic Navigation Map draft.  Now is the time to fix
this.  All reasonable suggestions are welcome; please suggest now.

What's needed is a way to reference authoritative materials as a way
of identifying "public topics".  A "public topic" is a concept or
subject that has a specifiable unique name in a specifiable namespace
created and/or managed by a specifiable authority on the topic, and
that is referenced as a public topic by anybody who wants to regard
the authority as an authority and the topic as a public topic,
regardless of whether the authority's namespace is online.  Really,
it's a bibliographic reference with certain very broad constraints and
used for a particular purpose.  I repeat my example:

Authority: Sears, Roebuck & Company
Namespace: 1922 Farm Catalog
     Name: [catalog number] R204

Should we be using a (subtype of?) bibloc for this purpose, perhaps
using the bibloc as a location source for a (subtype of?) namespace
location address?

[John, you are already on your way to becoming an SGML tribal elder,
yourself.  If you don't want that to happen, you'll have to try harder
to avoid being quite so helpful to the cause! (:^) ]

-Steve

--
Steven R. Newcomb, President, TechnoTeacher, Inc.
srn at techno.com  http://www.techno.com  ftp.techno.com

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