Deborah A. Lapeyre tweets:
An identifier is not a string, it is an association between a string and a thing #dataverse2015
I assume she is here: Dataverse Community Meeting 2015.
I be generous and assume that Deborah was just reporting something said by a speaker. 😉
What else would an identifier (or symbol) be if it wasn’t just a string?
What happens if we use a symbol (read word) in a conversation and the other person says: “I don’t understand.”
Do we:
- Skip the misunderstood part of the conversation?
- Repeat the misunderstood part of the conversation but louder?
- Expand or use different words for the misunderstood part of the conversation?
Are you betting on #3?
If you have every played 20 questions then you know that discovering what a symbol means involves listing other symbols and their values, while you try to puzzle out the original symbol
Think of topic maps as being the reverse of twenty questions. We start with the answer and we want to make sure everyone gets the same answer. So, how do you do that? You list questions and their answers (key/value pairs) for the answer.
It is a way of making the communication more reliable because if you don’t immediately recognize the answer, then you can consult the questions and their answers to make sure you understand.
Additional people can add their questions and answers to the answer so someone working in another language, for instance, can know you are talking about an answer they recognize.
True enough, you can claim an association between a string and “a thing” but then you are into all sorts of dubious and questionable metaphysics and epistemology. You are certainly free to list such an association between a string and a thing but that is only one question/answer among many.
You do realize of course that all the keys and values are answers in their own right and could also be described with a list of key/value pairs.
I think I like the reverse of twenty-questions better than my earlier identifier explanation. You can play as short or as long a game as you choose.
Does that work for you?