Re: [tm-pubsubj-comment] XTM questions

[Murray Altheim <m.altheim@open.ac.uk>]

Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
[...]
> | 3. Why did you use <scope> instead of xml:lang to provide
> | internationalization?
> 
> Because <scope> does many things *beyond* i18n, and xml:lang is in any
> case very limited in terms of indicating language. For example, you
> could use scope to indicate that what corporate culture A calls 'APAC'
> culture B calls 'Pacific rim'.
> 
> You may find <URL: http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-model/ >
> helpful to answer questions like these, by the way.

Lars Marius is correct.

Two more things to note regarding scope. First, <scope> is a
container for one *or more* topics, which act in combination. So,

   <scope>
     <topicRef xlink:href="#england"/>
     <topicRef xlink:href="#eighteenth_century"/>
   </scope>

means "England" AND "18th Century", not OR. Think of them as
coloured filters, additive.

Secondly, the values for xml:lang are the country and language
codes from ISO. We included two topic maps, country.xtm and
language.xtm, which established two sets of Published Subject
Indicators (PSIs) that were based on the same ISO code sets as
used in xml:lang, hence you can within an XTM document do
exactly the same thing as xml:lang, but more.

For example,

   <scope>
     <topicRef
       xlink:href="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/language.xtm#en"/>
     <topicRef
       xlink:href="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/country.xtm#US"/>
   </scope>                                                    ^^

is the same as

     <element xml:lang="en_US"/>
                        ^^^^^
but you can also do the additive thing described above to further
constrain the scope if you wish, say ( "US English" AND "Food" )
or ( "US English" AND "Manufacturing" ). And yes, you can use these
topics as subject indicators in a <topic> of their own, and then
use *that* topic in the <scope>, if you want to reuse it.

And to the extent that your question pertains to the use of PSIs
within scope, you aren't too far off the mark in choice of lists.
But the general list for discussing topic maps is maintained by
Michel Biezunski, at topicmapmail@infoloom.com. I think Michel
has list subscription info at infoloom.com if you wish to join.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                  <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK

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