RE: [xtm-wg] XTM-ISS Mergemaps and relationship to XML Include

[Daniel Rivers-Moore <daniel.rivers-moore@rivcom.com>]

Kal

Would following your suggestion below imply that implementations have to
actually *do* the merging, within the system? I think we need the
possiblility of "late binding", where the topics are only actually merged on
an "as-needed" basis. For some implementations, it might make sense to do
the merging immediately and cache the result; for others, it might make more
sense not to do any merging until some system or user calls on a piece of
information that requires the merging to be done.

One reason for not merging except on a Just-In-Time basis, is of course the
enormous size of some topic sets.

The NewsML standard (approved last Friday by the IPTC) has the notion of
TopicSetRef which allows the inclusion of all Topics in a referenced
TopicSet to be included within the current TopicSet. This inclusion is
subject to merging rules, which are stated in the comments to the NewsML
DTD. But the DTD is also explicit that this merging need not be performed
physically by the system. What is the case is that the data means the same
as would be meant by the data that would result from the merging having been
performed. In other words, the merging takes place at the level of the
conceptual model but not necessarily at the level of the syntactic model.

This confirms that the structure of the syntactic model and the conceptual
model need not be identical. For instance, there may be two Topic
*elements*, each with its own Duid (ID attribute - "Document-unique
Identifier), which in fact represent the same *topic*, because they have the
same FormalName within the same naming Scheme.

One of the reasons I have been so silent on this list over the past few
weeks is that I've been under contract to the IPTC to complete the NewsML
specification in time for the DTD to be formally approved on Friday 6
October in Amsterdam. That work is now successfully completed, and the DTD
unanimously approved by the IPTC membership at their face-to-face meeting. I
shall now be concentrating on working with the other members of the CMS to
bring our work to an appropriate stage for the meetings in Swindon at the
end of this week.

The NewsML DTD is available at
http://www.iptc.org/NewsML/DTD/NewsMLv1.0.dtd. I believe it contains many
useful syntactic constructs that could be useful for the ISS to consider.

Kind regards

Daniel


-----Original Message-----
From: Kal Ahmed [mailto:kal@ontopia.net]
Sent: 25 September 2000 10:56
To: xtm-wg@egroups.com
Subject: [xtm-wg] XTM-ISS Mergemaps and relationship to XML Include



I was interested in reading the discussions about xtm:mergemaps at the top
of the latest XTM DTD draft
(http://www.egroups.com/files/xtm-wg/Interchange/tmdtd-00-09-25%2Etxt). I
wondered if the use of XML Include (http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude) had been
considered as the processing model for this construct. It is (as the URL
indicates) still in working draft stage at the moment, but what it allows
for is the merging (their term...unfortunately) of multiple XML infosets.

'mergemaps' is going to be a necessary construct (I would go so far as to
say that if it is not part of XTM, it will get added as proprietary
extensions to XTM) and that potentially XML Include provides the framework
for describing how that construct is resolved *prior to* any topic map
parsing. The potential here is for a construct which is implemented by the
parser - i.e. involves no extra effort on my behalf...a definite win in the
XML world.

Cheers,

Kal


To Post a message, send it to:   xtm-wg@eGroups.com

To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: xtm-wg-unsubscribe@eGroups.com

-------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~>
Tellme Sports. Tellme Stocks. Tellme News. Just Tellme. 
Call 1-800-555-TELL and hear everything. For info visit:
http://click.egroups.com/1/9529/4/_/337252/_/971082167/
---------------------------------------------------------------------_->

To Post a message, send it to:   xtm-wg@eGroups.com

To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: xtm-wg-unsubscribe@eGroups.com