Researchers found mathematical structure that was thought not to exist
From the post:
Researchers found mathematical structure that was thought not to exist. The best possible q-analogs of codes may be useful in more efficient data transmission.
The best possible q-analogs of codes may be useful in more efficient data transmission.
In the 1970s, a group of mathematicians started developing a theory according to which codes could be presented at a level one step higher than the sequences formed by zeros and ones: mathematical subspaces named q-analogs.
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While “things thought to not exist” may pose problems for ontologies and other mechanical replicas of truth, topic maps are untroubled by them.
As the Topic Maps Data Model (TMDM) provides:
subject: anything whatsoever, regardless of whether it exists or has any other specific characteristics, about which anything whatsoever may be asserted by any means whatsoever
A topic map can be constrained by its author to be as stunted as early 20th century logical positivism or have a more post-modernist approach, somewhere in between or elsewhere, but topic maps in general are amenable to any such choice.
One obvious advantage of topic maps being that characteristics of things “thought not to exist” can be captured as they are discussed, only to result in the merging of those discussions with those following the discovery things “thought not to exist really do exist.”
The reverse is also true, that is topic maps can capture the characteristics of things “thought to exist” which are later “thought to not exist,” along with the transition from “existence” to being thought to be non-existent.
If existence to non-existence sounds difficult, imagine a police investigation where preliminary statements then change and or replaced by other statements. You may want to capture prior statements, no longer thought to be true, along with their relationships to later statements.
In “real world” situations, you need epistemological assumptions in your semantic paradigm that adapt to the world as experienced and not limited to the world as imagined by others.
Topic maps offer an open epistemological assumption.
Does your semantic paradigm do the same?