Re: [topicmaps-comment] RE: OASIS vs W3C

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

[<Tony.Coates@reuters.com>]
>
> I'm afraid I don't see a real distinction here.  One of the great things
about topic maps
> is the way topics are used to reify subjects, which effectively means that
URIs are
> assigned to the subjects (via the topics).  Add to that the fact that
while RDF
> is nominally about resources, it really can be used with any URI, whether
> it corresponds to a resource or not.  What you have, then, is effectively
> one-to-one mapping between subjects and resources/URIs (and resources
> are subjects, after all).  So the distinction is not clear cut about which
to use

Exactly.  A "resource" in RDF is some concept or thing to which you have
applied a URI.  That's no different from a (reified) subject in Topic Maps.
No, the real difference is that Topic Maps are specialized into a few
structures that - we hope - are widely useful.  We can write software to use
those structures.

RDF has only one structure really, the statement or triple, and it is very
simple, a real primitive.  It's like the difference between atoms and
molecules.  You build real things out of molecules, but you could build
anything out of atoms (one-by-one), except that only certain combinations
turn out to be useful.  If you were going to work with genes (to switch
domains here), you wouldn't want to work with atoms.  You would work with
the component molecules of DNA, not with atoms of carbon, oxygen, and
nitrogen.

With Topic Maps, if you want to deal with associations, they always have the
same structure and so you need only one piece of software that knows how to
work with them.  With RDF, you have to build each association up out of its
primitive parts, and create software that expects your approach to doing so.
On the other hand, with Topic Maps, you still have to handle all the pieces
at some point, and the range of options and specializations
(baseNameStrings, variants, and parameters, for example) make it harder to
index the database/knowledgebase.  Specialization vs generalisability.

Another potential difference is the support each system gives for ontology
and logic building.  Here, RDF has RDF Schemas, while Topic Maps has nothing
but some PSIs so far.

So as Tony says, the benefits of one vs. the other are not all that
clear-cut at this point.

Cheers,

Tom P