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

[Sam Hunting <sam_hunting@yahoo.com>]

> * Tony Coates
> | 
> | 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.

I had something like sgmlnorm in mind (takes all the minimization out,
and both the pre- and post-normalized documents conform to the same
DTD). I didn't have in mind a form of canonicalized output (like ESIS).


> * Murray Altheim
> | 
> | I can see* three types of "normalized" topic map, each possibly a
> | more successively processed document: 
> | 
> |   1. XTM-normalized
> |      This would be a "sorted" view of an XML document, sorted
> |      following some agreed-upon algorithm such as by-ID, by-scope,
> |      by-name-within-scope, occurrences-by-URI, etc.  This would 
> |      allow two XTM documents to be compared using common XML and 
> |      diff tools, but would not take into account differences due to

> |      merging, authoring approaches etc.

Being an unabashed graph head, to me two XTM documents are the same if
(ie, convey the same knowledge) they generate the same graph (ie,
demand the same nodes). If I wanted to determine whether two topic maps
were identical using text based tools, I would think about creating a
simple N3-like syntax (ie, simpler than the DTD for graphs on the topic
map site) and running my diffs on that... 

> I think this may be quite dangerous. It suggests that it is OK to
> import and export an XTM document without doing all the required
> processing on it.

Amen.
 
S.

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