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

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

Hi Mary,

* Mary Nishikawa
| 
| 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).

Actually, if you're using a single classification system I would think
that having it all in a single topic map would be the most practical.
I would expect most topic map tools to be able to handle some tens of
thousands of topics in-memory with no problem at all. And if you use a
database backend you should be able to go far beyond that.
 
| 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 have not, nor do I know of anyone that has. I must admit that I'm
somewhat skeptical of Martin's approach. It does allow considerable
freedom in one's choice of syntactical representation of topic maps,
but where is the value? 

If you follow this approach you should be aware that in order to view
your topic map you will need some solution for converting your topic
maps from your personal syntactic representation into XTM, since the
tools currently available only support XTM.

| 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.

There's not much to it, really. I use a text editor (Emacs) and edit
the files by hand, then load them into the Omnigator to see what they
look like. The only issues involved beyond this are really those of
ontology design, which you will have no matter what representation you
choose. 

| 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

What, in your opinion, are those advantages?

The people designing XTM 1.0 basically decided that XTM would be an
interchange syntax, and no more, which meant that anyone wanting
freedom of syntactic representation would still have it, but that the
onus of mapping from their own representation to XTM 1.0 would be on
them, rather than on the designers of XTM 1.0 and the implementors of
it, which to me makes perfect sense.

| Thinking about how to create the schema helps me organize my
| information better, which is what I am most interested in.

I am not sure what you mean by this. Could you expand on it?

| 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. 

Actually, one of the goals behind the design of Ontopia's not yet
released Topic Map Web Editor Framework is that you should be able to
use it to design editing applications where the users do not have to
know they are using topic maps (or even know XML/HTML). 

I think this must be the ultimate goal for all topic map editing
solutions. Some understanding of how each application represents its
information will of course be necessary, but beyond that it should not
be necessary to know the details of topic maps to make topic maps.

| Yet again, if we can figure out how to map what is in the database
| into the TM...

Do you have your classification system in a database? If so, it would
probably be quite easy to generate a topic map from it automatically.
That topic map would of course follow the structure of the original
classification closely, but if that's what you want it should solve the
problem for you immediately. If it's not it sounds to me like it could
still be a good start.

--Lars M.