RE: [egov] Representing polyhierarchical taxonomies in XML

["Peter F Brown" <peter@justbrown.net>]

Does the Terminological Markup Framework (ISO 16642 under TC37/SC3) offer
any help, particularly with their proposal for a data category registry...?

Peter

| -----Original Message-----
| From: Ann Wrightson [mailto:ann.wrightson@csw.co.uk]
| Sent: 02 July 2004 13:21
| To: 'Paul Spencer'
| Cc: egov@lists.oasis-open.org
| Subject: RE: [egov] Representing polyhierarchical taxonomies in XML
| 
| Paul,
| 
| The best tool I know for this job is Topic Maps, since in a topic map any
| one topic can participate in any number of hierarchical classifications.
| You
| can also modularize cleanly by representing each hierarchy as a separate
| topic map & merging just the ones you want to use.
| 
| Topic Maps have an XML encoding, however the XML is decoded into a
| different
| abstract structure for use (the latest published version of this
| specification is http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-model/ - browse the
| UML
| models rather than the text for an overview). Standard query capabilities
| for topic maps are coming soon - there are already some pilot
| implementations of querying available in topic map products.
| 
| IMO navigating the XML itself is a dead duck since XML does not (was never
| designed to) support this kind of thing (though it provides a neat syntax
| for representing some good ways of doing it). Jonathan Robie disagrees...
| but then he would, wouldn't he.
| 
| Ann W.
| 
| -----Original Message-----
| From: Paul Spencer [mailto:paul.spencer@boynings.co.uk]
| Sent: 02 July 2004 11:53
| To: e-Gov
| Subject: [egov] Representing polyhierarchical taxonomies in XML
| 
| The UK e-GMS metadata standard is a polyhierarchical taxonomy* in which an
| item in the hierarchy can have more than one parent. What would people
| consider the best way to represent this in XML? One option is DAML+OIL,
| but
| I am not sure of the status of this and defer to those with greater
| knowledge of representing taxonomies in XML.
| 
| My aim is to be able to navigate through the taxonomy, in particular, to
| find the parent(s) of a known taxonomy item. However, I am sure there are
| further applications in the taxonomy reconciliation work.
| 
| * see
| http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/documents/Tomatoes%20are%20not%20the%20only%20fr
| ui
| t%202002-12-19.doc
| 
| Regards
| 
| Paul Spencer
| Director
| Boynings Consulting Ltd
| http://www.boynings.co.uk
| 
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