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

[Robert Barta <rho@bigpond.net.au>]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 05:33:33PM +0900, Mary Nishikawa wrote:
> > > ............................. Yet again, if we can figure out how to map
> > > what is in the database into the TM...
> >
> >Perl is a precious friend here.
> 
> Do you have a perl conversion script  for a mapping (from what to what)?

I do not think there can be a generic database -> TM converter. This
is all application specific. Consider the following relational example
database:

create table students (
   firstname char(20),
   lastname char(20),
   student_id char(10),
   id unique key....
);
create table enrollments (
   student_id ...
   course_id
);
create table courses (
...
);

There are quite a few 'views' on this tiny system and various ways
to map this into a TM world. It depends what you want. And then a
local Perl Guru comes handy.

---

For the programmers here:

What I find pretty useful is to build SAX drivers as described in

  http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/09/19/sax-non-xml-data.html

That way you do not have to write an adapter for every different
format (XTM, LTM, AsTMa=, ...) but only a driver. The process
building the internal database is common to all via the chain
of SAX events.


A local Perl Gu\rho