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

[Kal Ahmed <kal@techquila.com>]

At 15:02 19/12/2001 +0900, Mary Nishikawa wrote:

>>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...

At the risk of being accused of trumpet blowing, take a look at TMTab 
(http://www.techquila.com/tmtab/index.html) - this is a Protege plug-in 
which enables a "TM designer" to create not only the topic map itself but 
also a set of forms for entering topics, occurrences and associations which 
can be constrained in much the same way as is allowed by using XML schema 
(restricting specific topic types to particular association roles, 
mandating particular names or occurrences for topics of a given type etc.) 
The nice thing about Protege is that the forms are generated 
"automagically" from the topic map design and only need minimal tweaking to 
get a useable UI. Better still, all of this can be done without knowing XML 
Schema, or even XTM syntax.

Cheers,

Kal