Abstract: From a pragmatic point of view, human readable names are still the most common way to identify the subject a topic is representing. However, names can be a tricky thing to represent due to their natural ambiguity, plurality of meanings and context dependency. Naturally there is always more than one valid way to model names. Guidelines or best practise recommendations which consider the tricky aspects are currently very rare. In this paper we will discuss 10 common pitfalls in dealing with names and based on that present three modelling templates for complex name structures in Topic Maps.
This short paper is part oft the session Ontology Modelling 2 at the TMRA 2009 conference.