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

["H. Holger Rath" <holger.rath@empolis.com>]

Tony.Coates@reuters.com wrote:
> 
> ...snip...
>
> Actually, I was talking with Sam Hunting at XML 2001 about the role on "nsgmls" in the
> history of SGML, and how one of its most useful functions was that it could normalise
> your input SGML into something that could then be processed by a less sophisticated
> application.  A similar tool for XTM, one that produced a particular normalised style of
> XTM that could then be processed using XSL-T, would be a very good thing indeed.

This magical piece of software is necessary for XTM conformance testing.
It would normalize the output of XTM processors and make them line-by-line
compareable. 

I remember some TopicMaps.Org discussions in Montreal about conformance 
testing and the problem of normalizing arbitrary XTM files which were 
exported from XTM software. Someone (Murry Altheim?) suggested to have
a piece of software which takes an XTM file and just writes out a
cannonical form of it - without (!) applying any XTM processing (e.g. 
merging). We know that proper sorting of the topics will be the real
problem (because of scopes). Any volunteers to develop this or who can
contribute valuable input to the design are highly appreciated?

Cheers,
--Holger

P.S.:	Happy new year!

-- 
Dr. H. Holger Rath
- Director Research & Development -

empolis * GmbH
Bertelsmann MOHN Media Group
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