Re: [topicmaps-comment] TMs & XTM [Was: skills to create topic ma ps]

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

* James David Mason
|
| I second Tony. Editing a TM in any XML encoding (I've used my own as
| well as XTM) is a pain, but I've sure done it. 

I've done it, too, and I'm never doing it again. It's just too painful.

| [...] I'm doing a map of about 1000 lines right now, and it's quite
| managable in XMetaL if I take a little care. While I'm developing a
| TM application, I can't think of any other way I'd rather do it.

Personally I use LTM for this. I've done a topic map of about 2000
topics, associations, and occurrences in this way (Scripts and
languages), and it's perfectly OK. As long as there's only a single
author, and that author is sufficiently technical, this works just
fine.

The inability to do automatic transforms and suchlike on the topic map
is a bit of a pain, and for very large topic maps I wouldn't do it,
but for other things it works really well.

The biggest problem at the moment is that only Ontopia's tools support
LTM, although you can use those to convert to XTM. I'm planning to
port Ontopia's LTM parser to the TMAPI, so that it can be used
together with TM4J, which would give us a free (well, open source)
alternative. 

--Lars M.