Re: [topicmaps-comment] RE: [sc34wg3] Re: PMTM4 and XTM Layer 1.0

[Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@garshol.priv.no>]

* Thomas B. Passin
| 
| Well, probably the best thing is for lots of people to get good working
| experience with useful topicmaps. 

Amen and halleluja! I think that apart from writing topic map software
this is just about the most useful thing anyone can do now, and it
becomes much more useful if the topic maps are made public.

| Are there any substantial topic maps out there that have some real depth to
| them?  By that, I mean depth of hierarchy, or even better, that they would
| be more of a network than a hierarchy.

Probably the one that gets closest is my scripts and languages topic
map. You can access it with two difference interfaces:

  <URL: http://www.ontopia.net/omnigator/models/index.jsp >
  <URL: http://www.ontopia.net/i18n/index.jsp >

"Northern Linear" and "Brahmi" both have very deep hierarchies beneath
them. Also, if you traverse from scripts to languages you get quite a
few cycles. I'd like to extend those by adding information about
language families, but have so far not had time.

I would also like to add another classification: by visual appearance,
and perhaps also some more interrelationships, such as: influenced by.
That should, I hope, help to make the structure of the topic map more
interesting. 

Steve's Opera topic map is also better than the Free XML Tools map,
but perhaps not quite as cyclical as scripts and languages, and
certainly with no hierarchies of similar size. (The tree under brahmi
contains 38 scripts, that under northern linear also 38. Some more
entries are likely to be added to both with time, and there is some
evidence to suggest that they should be joined.)

| For example, Lar's big topic map on free XML software.  You have one
| or two top level categories, then a topic for software, then one or
| two associations to get its author, etc, then you are done, nowhere
| to go.

This really reflects how the topic map came into being. It is
generated automatically from an XML document that quite simply doesn't
have any more information. If I could add platform information it
would get a little better, but I keep putting that off...

| Anyone?

Well, Tom, I'm sure you have some subject _you're_ interested in, that
you could topic map? :-)

--Lars M.