What is the difference between a Topic and a Context (or a Topic's manisfestation as a web)?

It's a semantics issue. Language has a flatness quality about it but, at any stage, words can become their own context. A Wiki is a shared space, its where my definition of a word in a context meets your definition of the same word in the same context. Hence, it is a good place in which to make agreement. That flatness collapses my idea on top of yours and hence we talk and come to agreement.

Sometimes, however, I'm not ready to agree. I am just exploring. I may want to use ShallowWikiWords such as KnownProblems because I know that I am working within a specific context. I need my own namespace, my own context, so that my idea of KnownProblems doesn't pollute the global idea of KnownProblems. They are KnownProblems of the context.

I need my own space in the context of a topic of my choosing. I want to be able to create my own contexts as freely as I do in language. Hence, I rather suspect that a WikiWord should be able to be a context for other WikiWords. Thus, there is no difference between a Topic and a Web. If this is useful it will affect on how we would implement storage of topics and webs. (see AttachmentsUnderRevisionControl)

I'm almost finished but a topic usually incorporates the context of other topics. This reminds me of NameSpaces in programming langauges such as use LWP(someroutine) in Perl that brings in the single topic, er, subroutine, "someroutine" into the context of this topic.

Brain dump ends. For now. Add yours.

-- MartinCleaver - 12 Mar 2001

Have a look at PackageTWikiTopic. I agree Web.Topic.SubTopic#Anchor{Classification} is purely a semantic issue. The plan is for PackageTwikiStore it be generic enough to handle the implemenation of these context in a sufficent manner.

-- NicholasLee - 12 Mar 2001

On a related note; what is the difference between an attachment and a topic and a topic and a web ...? One can imagine a topic below a topic e.g.

TopicOne
	TopicA
	TopicB
	attachment1.txt

Here TopicOne is a sub-web as well as being a Topic. attachement1.txt appears to be a special topic in TopicOne. We could perhaps see attachments as being terminal nodes in a tree i.e. topics can have topics within them, attachments are special topics that can't have topics within them. A web is a topic that has some of a set of special topics within them e.g. home, search etc. Not sure if this is useful, but as I've worked on AttachmentsUnderRevisionControl I couldn't help thinking that attachments and topics were more similar than different (despite the way the code is at the moment).

-- JohnTalintyre - 15 Mar 2001

The difference being that a sub-topic wont appear in the context of the parent's topics presentation, but a file attachment will. That of course could be changed, and instead something like a generic mechanism for attaching sub-topic style information could be introduced. I was planning to include low-level file management via the TWiki::Store susb-system. I'll consider this as well as part of the API.

-- NicholasLee - 15 Mar 2001

With respect to the inherent structure and content of attachments: Certain attachments have structure (Esp. Powerpoint presentations). I can see a day when I upload a powerpoint presentation to a topic and Twiki creates sub topics in the context of that powerpoint presentation such that I can refer to the slides in that ppt from another part of TWiki. (In effect giving each ppt slide its own topic).

I can see a day when by uploading a powerpoint automatically creates an index of the content of that powerpoint. This is something that I am exploring with WebServices.

Hmm. sounds like a lot is possible. See MsOfficeIntegration

-- MartinCleaver - 26 Mar 2001

I'm exploring some of the ideas further off-line in my consideration on the bets way to approach TWikiModularisation.

Basically in a design where SubTopics exist within a strict tree, Webs and Topics can be consider basically the same thing. ie. Given some content tree (in the graph theory sense) reach node contains information that might be View(ed) as a Web or a Topic.

The stuff I have at the moment isn't ready of Codev yet, although I could just brain dump it somewhere for people to comment on. Hopefully I can get some sort of RFC together in the next while.

-- NicholasLee - 07 Jun 2001