Re: [tm-pubsubj-comment] An Unanswered Posting

[Scott Tsao <skst4xml@yahoo.com>]

This is an e-mail I received from Thomas which I felt
compelled to share on this list:

=====================================================

Scott, 

as far as I understand you, you want to *merge* both
maps. I am not a friend of merging every topic that
"has the same basename within the same scope"
automatically. This will give poor results. You will
need human intelligence.

I would start with converting both glossaries into a
seperate topic map each. As you have HTML formats you
may be lucky to find some encoding style (like using
<H1> for the terms exclusively, or similar) that helps
you to use  XSLT for a conversion to any XML Topic Map
encoding. 

KnowledgeTaxi will contain an auto-classification
feature that suggests significant topics for any piece
of free text. So I would classify each
term-and-definition text of glossary A using Topic Map
B and vice versa.

The result is a list of associations between the terms
of both glossaries. This is just a intermediate
result. 

This can help to find similar definitions in both
glossaries/maps, but I am afraid that no tool will be
able to replace human intelligence when strategic
decisions are needed about which topics could be
merged into one.

After you have merged both glossaries I would throw
away the intermediate associations and run the
auto-classification on each term-and-definition text
of Topic Map (AB) using Topic Map (AB) which results
in a suggestion for associations that should be part
of the final topic map.

I do not really understand why you want to *convert*
this TM into published subjects and build another TM.
Why not simply use and extend this TM?

KnowledgeTaxi provides an indexing system for
information assets. You can run auto-classification on
each document and save the classifying topics-IDs with
each document-URI, and you can search this list.  

Hope I have at least answered some of your questions, 

Thomas Bandholtz 
XML Competence Center 
SchlumbergerSema 
Sema GmbH 
Kaltenbornweg 3 
D50679 Köln/Cologne 
++49 (0)221 8299 264 


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of
your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com
or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com