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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] The Map/Territory Conundrum in Topic Maps vs. RDF
 At last week's Extreme Markup Languages 2001 conference in Montreal I heard the "map is not the territory" platitude invoked with monitory gravity at key moments in a number of arguments. As it happened, it was Topic Map proponents in every case warning against what they saw as an inherent danger in RDF, but I have heard RDF diehards use the same argument to emphasize some fundamental distinction between the semantics of their predicates and the underlying instance syntax. May I respectfully suggest that in the inherent nature of markup the map is in fact--in a real and inalienable sense--the territory, and vice versa, of course. It is the application of markup to some lexical content which produces the concrete instance which is itself the syntactic territory to be mapped. This incorporation of the structure, the ontological understanding, the navigational aid into the stuff to be structured, understood, or navigated is what such terms as 'self-describing' applied to markup mean. It is uniquely the nature of markup up text that the content and the commentary are interwoven in a particular lexical sequence that defines the instance, and that in processing that instance both the markup and the content are at their first handling manipulated by the same lexical tools. Ironically, it is only if we were to posit a Platonic form of the territory, of which the particular concrete instance was only a projection, that we might reasonably argue that the instance territory was fundamentally distinct from its ontological map. And that line of thinking would expect that the markup in the instance text was itself a projection of some Platonic form of map, aligned only in the ideal realm with the particular Platonic form of territory of which the non-markup content of this instance is the concrete projection. Those premises are the very converse of markup. In markup the concrete instance, by incorporating both content and a particular gloss upon that content, is precisely both territory and map. Respectfully, Walter Perry 
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