Published Subject Indicators for Thing Types

PSI Metadata

The first major subclass arises in the natural universe. It has many types, some of which need vast taxonomies to fully model, and lots of ResourceData on their properties:

• natural_stuff = material disease energy spacetime
• social_stuff = emotion wealth influence information

Independently, a substance may have physical qualities, or purely mental ones, or both if it plays some symbolic role in communication, status, or wealth. Symbolic substances can be difficult to model, as they have a two-fold essense.

Such a classification interacts with the orthogonal natural/social one to partition all stuff into several dissimilar types. Objects inherit many of their characteristics from the substances of which they are made, so it is useful to model those substances properly.

• abstraction = temporality arrangement
• physicality = artifact landmark organism
• collective = quantity repository group agency

An O-O language like Java can handle isolated objects, but WORDS is far better at modeling their associations. These may arise - as they do in English - whenever something modeled by a phrase is cited in a clause modeling a situation. Declare them within a Topic Map, and Java code can then use it as a smart data store that guides intelligent decision making.

Each situation is really a small ontology for one association type, distantly related to a template but with executable role elements, which can generate and mutate persistent examples of a:

• state = relation perception
• event = thinking doing telling
• context = setting description project plan

The context subtypes help pull new topics into a framework, linked to older topics by patterns of associations named by the English verbs and prepositions input. The logic accomplishing this is embedded within topics modeling aspects. (If the one you need does not yet exist, you can usually define it in seconds.)

• propType = identifier attribute locator script
• roleType = classifier part ordinal symbol -(others TBD)-

In WORDS, a propType denotes an occurrence type meant to hold some kind of URI, or an XSD character String or an aspect-specific script or data type model. These aspect values may be inherited into topic A from other associated topics, B, C, etc.. Non-inheritable topic names are also special-case propTypes.

The roleType models a type of rolePlayer. Its value cannot be inherited, but it can inherit properties, including scripts that make it seem intelligent on relating its range and domain topics, in both their concrete and abstract forms. If you want to build clever applications, these topics deserve the bulk of your attention.

These rules let each aspect semi-independently manage its own tiny microworld within the XTM-portable topic map which it inhabits. And because each aspect does its own job well, the overall TM operates as a procedure-enriched, aspect-oriented knowledge-base - a domain-specific semantic lexicon extending the most general meanings for English words.