Re: [xtm-wg] language.xtm

[Murray Altheim <altheim@eng.sun.com>]

Daniel Rivers-Moore wrote:
> 
> I do not think it makes sense to create a PSI for each item in a vocabulary
> like the ISO country codes. What *does* make sense, however, is to create a
> PSI for the ISO standard itself, then to create a topic for each language
> you are interested in, giving it a baseName equal to its ISO language code,
> scoped on the topic that is the ISO standard. This for me is one powerful
> paradigm for appropriate use of baseNames. You use a baseName that is a term
> in a controlled vocabulary, scoped on the vocabulary. This baseName is
> guaranteed unique in that scope, because the scope is a controlled
> vocabulary, and the organisation that controls it (in this case ISO) can be
> trusted to ensure that no two things are given the same name in that
> vocabulary. Thus the topic naming constraint applies appropriately. Any two
> topics that are given that baseName in that scope will indeed have the same
> subject, namely the language (or whatever else it might be) that has that
> name within that vocabulary. The same approach works for country codes etc.

Daniel,

I must admit I can't understand the point you're making, unless I agree
with it so strongly that it goes by me. I'm already doing exactly what
you suggest in the language.xtm and country.xtm topic maps that are part
of the "Internationalization in XTM" Technical Report I hope to publish
next week. If it weren't for meetings today and relatives visiting this
weekend, I'd probably have it by Monday. I will announce when it is 
available in this forum.

> 
> As for dates and time periods, which have the subject of some interesting
> discussion, it would be perfectly possible to have a topic whose basename is
> "20010315" in the scope of a topic whose subject is ISO 8601. The subject of
> this topic would be 15 March 2001.

Note that I'm also publishing (within I hope two to three weeks) a second
Technical Report entitled "Datatypes in XTM" which will describe a method
of incorporating typed data (i.e., data in a specific notation) within a
topic map, so that dates, date ranges, temperatures, latitude and longitude,
and other measurements can be expressed. This will also allow for things
like SVG to be either referenced or included within the <variantName> 
element (via <resourceData> or <resourceRef>, as appropriate), so that 
base names can be expressed by notation-typed content such as the 
aforementioned SVG, GIF, JPEG or MPEG, or even Java classes. This will 
allow for a greater expression of topic maps, and provide a way to notify
the application that the target of a link is a GIF image rather than 
relying on the broken file extension mechanism.

BTW, I'm grabbing the semantics of the W3C's XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes 
specification as the basis for the datatypes TR, rather than ignoring the
enormous amount of effort that has been spent in developing such a beast
and trying to reinvent the wheel here.

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim, SGML/XML Grease Monkey     <mailto:altheim&#64;eng.sun.com>
XML Technology Center
Sun Microsystems, 1601 Willow Rd., MS UMPK17-102, Menlo Park, CA 94025

      In the evening
      The rice leaves in the garden
      Rustle in the autumn wind
      That blows through my reed hut.  -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu

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