Re: [xtm-wg] A challenge on "the graph"

["Bernard Vatant" <universimmedia@wanadoo.fr>]

[Sam]

> However, I appeal to you to at least throw out some suggestions NOW --
> there is a nice intellectual ferment going on right now, with more and
> more people involved, and I think NOW would be an opportunity to get
> people thinking about at least some of your ideas (if you are willing
> to expose them when they are short of perfection). That way, when you
> have things more consistent, the ground will be prepared for people to
> accept them.

There are in fact so many - too many for my single mind - things passing by
in that debate.
What can I can say NOW is, out of an afternoon on the phone with the graph
people (BTW not "professeurs" but "chercheurs")

The model they propose is ridiculously simple. Just a translation of nodes
and arcs into ... vertices and edges :)
They say indeed : Topic Maps are so simple. Why did you complicate them with
all that unnecessary twisted syntax ?
The nodes of the same type have the same color. So have the arcs of the same
type. Some TM elements will be nodes, some other will be arcs. There will be
basic rules on the colors of nodes and arcs, and that's all there will be
... In fact, it's as simple and obvious as Topic Maps looked to me ...
before I began to look into the syntax :o)

And they claim : " The graph modeling shows some inconstencies and
shortcomings of the XTM syntax model and the DTD. But it's very easy to
clean that". And I said : *Please* - there has been enough of blood and
tears - don't *ever* mention the DTD.

BUT ... they know how to put these sets of colored nodes and arcs in a
system and have algorithms to spider the graph and query and retrieve
amazing things you just can't do in a relational data base, like : "Take any
(A,B) in a set of entangled genealogical trees. Find every couple made of a
descendant of A married to a descendant of B". Or : "Find me a family where
all members of three following generations were born, married and dead in
the same county". Weird things like that. And they claim these algorithms
have been around for ages.

And they claim it's not academic work, and that Francfort's Airport traffic
and New York's garbage collection, among others, are working with
implemented models grounded in graph theory. And they've brought some
interesting features into Mondeca software, too, as some of you know ...

So we have at hand a conceptual model and a processing model, and query
algorithms, all grounded in the most universal representation language I
know, and I think less controversial than any of those passing by lately :
mathematics ...

What more ? We'll have a F2F meeting next week to put all that down in a
single document for the community use.
I propose to write down that document in such a way that it meets the
mathematicians' requirements and the eagerness of XTM community to
understand them. Is NOW time span extendable up to one week ?

Cheers all

Bernard


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