Re: [tm-pubsubj-comment] Re: [topicmapmail] ANN: UNSPSC topic mapavailable

[Kal Ahmed <kal@techquila.com>]

On Tuesday 15 October 2002 02:51, Mary Nishikawa wrote:
> At 10:01 PM 10/14/2002 +0100, Kal Ahmed wrote:
> >On Monday 14 October 2002 21:15, Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> > > * Kal Ahmed
> > >
> > > | For no particular reason other than "because it is there", I've
> > > | converted the Universal Standard Products and Services
> > > | Classification into XTM form and uploaded the results to [1].
> > >
> > > Oh. You too? :-)
> >
> >Great minds...
>
> Kal, glad you see the importance of this too :-)
>
> > > | For those that don't know the UNSPSC is a standard hierarchical
> > > | classification of commercial products and services and, according to
> > > | the publishers "is used in sell side and buy side catalogs and as a
> > > | standardized account code in analyzing expenditure (Spend
> > > | Analysis)."  [2].
> > >
> > > Mary Nishikawa uses it in her paper from Extreme 2002:
> > >   <URL:
> > > http://www.idealliance.org/papers/extreme02/html/2002/Nishikawa01/EML20
> > >02Ni shikawa01-toc.html >
> >
> >Great minds...
>
> Many "great" minds together = progress?  ;-)
>
> This talk developed  from countless discussions with Lars Marius and a year
> of discussions with the OASIS TM Published subjects members (see the
> credits in my paper).
> Kal, we welcome you :-)
>

Thanks! I feel embarrassed that I didn't find that paper. My excuse is that I 
didn't get to go to Montreal this year. Not much of an excuse, I know :-)

> Actually Jack Park came to my talk, and he asked that I write a chapter for
> the next Advances in Topic Maps book -    (this is what he meant by "portal
> integration" with topic maps -- Jack's description of what I will be
> writing on). You will be writing a chapter too, right? Great minds together
> :-)
>
> I am hoping that my Late Breaking News talk for XML 2002  is accepted
> because I am expanding on the ideas presented in my Extreme Markup paper.
> The UNSPSC was only the beginning and the point was to show that a standard
> "upper level" and generalized scheme can be used a central location for
> others to "pick up" binding points to use in their own maps of internal use
> subjects; I want to have fixed published subjects for the UNSPSC and
> publish them in a fixed place. It would be a good idea for the owners of
> the classification, the ECCMA,  to do this, as I said in my talk, but we
> may need to first publish it in http://psi.oasis-open.org
>

Mary, I think that we are both thinking along exactly the same lines. I would 
be interested to hear see your presentation as I'm not going to get to make 
it to XML 2002 either (the Atlantic really sucks sometimes ;-). Do you have 
other vocabularies in mind ?

One thing that I think is interesting is that you and I took different 
approaches to topic naming - I left out the numbers from the name. You have 
added sort names with the numbers to allow a different sort order of the 
topics. Another difference is that my topic map contains version information 
(which may or may not be of use to topic map users). Yet with a common PSI we 
would be able to merge both views of the same data. In fact, it should be 
possible to create a mediating topic map with the sole purpose of causing the 
two different views of the same data to be merged. Thats something I think 
I'll have a go at.

Some organisation should be involved in the bootstrap process. I think OASIS 
is ideally placed to do this if neither ECCMA nor the UNDP nor UN-SPSC would 
go for it. But thats three big ifs in a row. 

> The UNSPSC is used by web services, so I am sure you see the importance of
> this.
>

Absolutely - I really can't imagine directory services like UDDI working 
without topic maps to be honest.

> The Library of Congress could very well do the same thing.
>
> > > | Lacking any form of suitable subject indicator I have opted to
> > > | create a private urn namespace x-unspsc. Perhaps someone on this
> > > | list could suggest a better way to provide useful subject indicators
> > > | for this map ?
> > >
> > > What about the old tired-and-true method of http URIs that point to
> > > nowhere? I feel that is better than making new URI schemes
> >
> >I've done that an awful lot in the past and I feel guilty about it. My
> >feeling
> >(now) is that at least one knows where one stands with a made-up URN
> >namespace. There is no way of resolving it, so there is no possibility
> > that by resolving it a subject descriptor would appear. In other words it
> > serves as a simple identifier (unfortunately not necessarily a unique
> > identifier, but I suppose I could use urn:x-techquila.com:unspsc:  on the
> > basis that fewer people are going to use the x-techquila.com namespace in
> > their made-up URNs).
>
> Kal, see my paper and the work of the committee.
>

Thanks for the pointers - I'll read through this stuff in more detail 
tonight/tomorrow and hopefully have something more constructive to add a 
little later.

Cheers,

Kal