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

[Mary Nishikawa <nisikawa@fuchinobe.skk.slb.com>]

>Lars Marius Garshol:
>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,

I am at the exploratory stage now with Topic Maps, currently delving more 
deeply into Martin Bryan's W3C Schema representation of ISO 13250 Topic 
Maps http://www.diffuse.org/TopicsMaps/schema.html and have been 
wondering  about  how to get a huge classification system with thousands of 
topics into topic maps (I would guess that it would not be practical  to 
work with only one TM for this number of topics).

I began my study of the ISO standard, working hands on with the information 
and files provided in Martin's  draft, and found that I can load this 
schema into XMLSpy 4.0 to create my own TM Schema from the examples 
supplied. His schema design is simple, elegant, and reflects the spirit of 
the original specification, the definitions  are exact, and  his documented 
examples are very easy to understand. Lars, have you tried this yet, or do 
you know others who have?

I would also like to work with XTM, but I haven't done so yet, so I am 
interesting in learning how you are creating your maps using LTM.   For 
those using XTM to create topic maps,  I see the advantages of having 
everyone using the same dtd for interchangeability, but the ability to use 
an abstract element declaration for each type that can be used to design 
one's own schema to create a customized topic map has advantages  that 
shouldn't be missed (I have to say I am looking for  colleagues to 
try  this approach out). Thinking about how to create the schema helps me 
organize my information better, which is what I am most interested in.

I have a feeling that there will be some middle ground somewhere, and 
results may be very exciting.

Related to the original posting [skills to create topic maps]  if someone 
were to take this approach, I think the TM creator would need to be quite 
familiar with the W3C XML Schema structures and datatypes, namespaces,  and 
Xlink for a start, but if the schema were designed already, it might not be 
necessary. Actually, I could see myself designing a schema that could be 
used by knowledge workers, not necessarily knowing xml,  to create TMs in 
an xml authoring environment. Yet again, if we can figure out how to map 
what is in the database into the TM...

Cheers!
Mary
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Mary Y. Nishikawa, Technical Editor & EDMS Support
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