* W. Eliot Kimber | | I'm asking this question because it's not clear to me what the | semantic of scope is: does it mean that a characteristic is | meaningful when *any* of the themes in the scope is "active" or does | it mean that the characteristic is meaningful IFF *all* of the | themes in the scope are active.

ISO 13250:2000 clearly says that a topic characteristic assignment is valid when any of the themes in the scope apply. XTM clearly says that this is undefined, while the current SAM draft clearly says that all themes in the scope must apply...

The following URIs will take you to information on where this currently stands:

<URL: http://www.ontopia.net/omnigator/models/topic_complete.jsp?tm=tm-standards.xtm&id=term-scope-def > <URL: http://www.ontopia.net/omnigator/models/topic_complete.jsp?tm=tm-standards.xtm&id=scope-unconstrained-rep > <URL: http://www.ontopia.net/omnigator/models/topic_complete.jsp?tm=tm-standards.xtm&id=prop-scope-structure >

Input on these issues is very much welcome, from you or anyone else.

| I think it's the former, but I'm not sure there's concensus on this | or even if there can be consensus on this.

There must be, I am afraid. It will be unnecessarily difficult to define a query language without agreeing on this. Also, topic maps are less likely to merge correctly if people choose different policies for this.

| In the context of Cyc, I think "active" means "in the current | content (microtheory)", so I can represent either use of scopes, I | just need to know which it should be or if it should be an | import-time option.

An import-time option seems safer for now.