Hi, Eric:

That's a really interesting thought -- if lack of precision contributes to the challenge of the asynchronous and decentralized conversations in our brave new world, markup should be able to contribute to the solution.

Because IBIS seems to be about relationships, I'm wondering if a DITA approach might make use of a map specialization -- perhaps using specialized topicrefs to

• Assign the definitional role for an idea or question to an existing topic
• Establish flexible and maintainable relationships between these ideas and questions
• Assign pro and con argument roles with respect to these ideas to other existing topics

In particular, the relationship between defined ideas and their pro and con arguments seems similar to the relationships between defined subjects and classified content or between defined learning objectives and learning content.

One other benefit of specializing a map -- you could point at ideas or arguments defined elsewhere on the web or in different formats (using the format attribute of topicref).

It would work best with the proposed key-based referencing for DITA 1.2 because the topic that best defines an idea or question might change without changing the correctness of the pro or con argument role for other content.

FWIW, as a precedent for modeling IBIS with relationships rather than a structural type, Danny Ayers drafted an RDF representation of IBIS a while back (http://dannyayers.com:88/xmlns/ibis/).


Thanks,


Erik Hennum
ehennum@...

Eric Armstrong <eric.armstrong@...>

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