I was going over some notes on synonyms this weekend when it occurred to me to ask:
How many synonyms does a topic item have in the TMDM legend?
A synonym being when one term can be freely substituted for another.
Not wanting to trust my memory, I quote from the TMDM legend (ISO/IEC 13250-2):
Two topic items are equal if they have:
- at least one equal string in their [subject identifiers] properties,
- at least one equal string in their [item identifiers] properties,
- at least one equal string in their [subject locators] properties,
- an equal string in the [subject identifiers] property of the one topic item and the [item identifiers] property of the other, or
- the same information item in their [reified] properties.
The wording is a bit awkward for my point about synonyms but I take it that if two topic had
at least one equal string in their [subject identifiers] properties,
I could substitute:
at least one equal string in their [item identifiers] properties, (in all relevant places)
and have the same effect.
I am going to be exploring the use of synonym based processing for TMDM governed topic maps.
Any thoughts or insights would be greatly appreciated.