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

[Tony.Coates@reuters.com]

Robbo, mate, ...

On 28/12/2001 04:09:33 Robert Barta wrote:

>Psychology aside, XML is _JUST A_ flexible data interchange format.
>
>XTM is in my view unsuitable for authoring. There is a good reason why
>text-oriented formats like
>
>   http://www.ontopia.net/download/ltm.html
>   http://topicmaps.bond.edu.au/astma/astma.html
>
>(and maybe others) exist as our experiments have shown. On average, the quality
>of a AsTMa= student maps is considerable higher than of maps written in XTM.
>I'm not convinced whether graphical development environments really speed up
>authoring.

If you find it easier editing textual formats for topic maps, then that is what you get for using Emacs/vi/Notepad in the first place.  My own experiences, XTM and otherwise, is that using a real XML editor for XML is certainly no *less* productive than using a text editor for plain text.  That said, I can understand that your students may not be able to afford personal copies of XMetaL (etc.), particularly when they would have to pay for them in Aussie dollars (for you non-Aussies, we sometimes refer to our dollar as the "South Seas Peso" ...).

For most users, I would expect a "graphical" editor, based on some sort of template system that restricts what you can do so that the interface is more focussed on the job at hand, to be infinitely more useful than a text editor with even the best textual topic map format.  For students, I would suggest that Protege+tmtab is better than doing it by hand.  That said, I tried maintaining my Web bookmarks for a while as a topic map, processing the exported XTM into XHTML using some XSL-T.  However, I didn't have a suitably focussed editor (given that I had only two association types to worry about), and XTM is not the easiest thing to use XSL-T on (or at least, I haven't developed sufficiently good techniques yet).  I've settled instead on using a small DTD defining my own custom XML format.  Much easier to work with using standard XML tools, and still easy to convert into XTM using an XSL-T stylesheet whenever I need to.  Given that writing your own DTDs is not a task for most of the
population, this is not a broadly applicable solution, hence the need for good (affordable) tools that make it simple to define the topics you want and define the associations you need between them with a minimum of fuss.

By the way, XML is way more than just a flexible data interchange format.  If that was all it was, with no tools to speak of, then almost nobody would care.  What makes it compelling is the technical infrastructure that has been built around it, and the fact that people find working with XML to be less error-prone than working with plain text (if this were not the case, Perl would have made XML unnecessary, which it clearly didn't).  However, in my earlier posts, I wasn't arguing that XTM should be used as more than just an interchange syntax.  Rather, I was arguing that it should be able to be used as an interchange syntax between *any* applications, and not just as a private interchange syntax for topic map engines.

     Cheers,
          Tony.

PS  At this time of year, I wish I was staying at the Gold Coast myself.  Good luck to you, mate.
========
Anthony B. Coates
(1) Information Architect
(2) Leader of XML Architecture & Design
Chief Technology Office
Reuters Plc, London.
Tony.Coates@reuters.com
========



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