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

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

* Thomas B. Passin
| 
| The main difficulty in hand-authoring topic maps is not syntax, 

I agree, provided you don't use XTM. XTM is a nice syntax, but it does
not work for humans.

| The key points are these, in my view:
| 
| 1) Finding the ID values for previously defined topics, so they can
| be referenced.  This is easy in a tiny map, but gets progressively
| harder as the map gets larger. Also, it gets harder and harder to
| remember which topics you have already defined, and naming can get
| to be a problem.

True. dynabbrevs in Emacs help a lot with this, as does a schema
validator. 

A real topic map editing solution, however, will have to hide the
syntax completely, otherwise it's just not a good editor.

| Similarly, it gets harder and harder to decide on what scopes to
| create and apply, and you start to need help in seeing which ones
| you have allready assigned to a name or occurrence.

This I have not experienced. In fact, I've found scoping to be fairly
easy to manage, but perhaps we use it in different ways.
 
| When the map gets bigger, you also find it harder to modify it -
| especially deletions and corrections.

This is also true. There is a limit to how far the text editing
approach scales. 

| 2) Deciding how to model various kinds of information, ie.,
| occurrences vs associations, and then being consistent about them.
| This includes any reification you may be tempted to do.

Absolutely. Modelling is a major issue, and no authoring solution is
going to do it for you.
 
| 3) Creating your ontology and being very clear about when something
| is an instance vs. being a subclass of another topic.

Isn't this the same as 2? Instance vs subclass does seem to be fairly
difficult. I've found that a good rule of thumb when wondering whether
B is a subclass of A to find some instance of B and then ask myself
whether it's also an instance of A. If the answer is yes, then B is a
subclass, if it's no it's not.

(Is "opera" a subclass of "art form"? It follows from the fact that
"Tosca" is not an "art form" that it is not.)
 
--Lars M.