Re: [xtm-wg] Fixing language.xtm and country.xtm

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

James Mason writes:
[...]
> Now that we've been working with TMs for a while, we realize the ISO
> decision may have been wrong. I've been having offline discussions with
> Newcomb and Biezunski since we got back from Berlin. There are some PSIs
> attached to XTM that really need to be online in a fixed place (we don't
> want the typical XML Namespace dead URI problem). Those PSIs are even more
> fundamental than country.xtm and language.xtm. They really need to be in a
> PERMANENT place. One idea that has been suggested is that they need PURLs,
> and the place for PURLs is, of course, OCLC.

Jim,

Actually, we already have this, and I consider them permanent. The PSIs for
all currently-approved XTM topics are posted as the following examples:

  http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/core.xtm#class-instance
  http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/country.xtm#fr
  http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/language.xtm#en

I would hope that we would not make a decision to alter this. These three
topic maps have been sitting up on the site since we approved them. The
updates that I've made to the latter two are backward compatible but adds
the updates from ISO 3166 and ISO 639 as approved by their respective
bodies, incorporates the three digit codes as recommended, I've added
the UN and MARC codes, and the country.xtm topic map now has incorporated
geographical regions (so you now know that Sudan is in Eastern Africa).

Lars Marius can go ahead and spend time duplicating this effort, but the
reason we have standards bodies is to reach consensus among a large group
of people over work items agreed upon by the group. Come Montreal we'll
have to decide between two competitive topic maps, which seems pretty 
pointless. Sure, SAX and linux didn't come out of standards bodies, but
how many projects or cul de sacs don't we hear about because they
weren't taken up by a consensus?

I plan to be posting as many as three sets of topic maps prior to 
Montreal (depending on how much I can get done): Datatypes, I18n (the
updates to language and country), and a fundamental logical relations TM.
I'm willing to post non-core work and work on it publicly, but I'd much
prefer there be actually people paying attention. I think I'm bristling
most at Lars Marius' lack of concern over following any process because
he doesn't seem to have any sensitivity regarding the problems we've had
in this group. We have our own little history that needs fixing, and 
this rush rush rush absent proper following of process is very much
symptomatic of difficulties we've had in the past, and this is something
that is avoidable. Easily avoidable.

Back to the subject at hand, there is one thing I'd like to do with the
three topic maps currently online, and with ones in the future. Come
next month, Sun will be making available an open source implementation
of the ebXML Registry and Repository. This implementation will not
have the ISO 11179 attributes (since ebXML has not yet approved such a
thing), but it could serve as a great repository for objects and metadata
about them. PSIs, for example. I'm working with one of the implementing
engineers on this idea, and in fact hope to use it in the bootstrap.org
project as well. The implementation can use Oracle or any other database,
and I've got a request in to deliver the implementation with an 
available, open source database so that it can be up and running. This
would mean hooking the TopicMaps.Org site into the registry, which would
mean we need a machine online that we completely control, preferably
not from a private company. It needs the same neutrality and permanency
as TopicMaps.Org. But I think we can solve both the political and
technical issues.

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim                            <mailto:altheim&#x40;eng.sun.com>
XML Technology Center
Sun Microsystems, Inc., MS MPK17-102, 1601 Willow Rd., 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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