Re: [topicmaps-comment] multilingual thesaurus - language,scope ,and topic naming constraint

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

* Thomas Bandholtz
| 
| In a single XML document, all attributes of type ID have to be
| unique. A validating parser will check this. Generally this asures
| as well that all internal references (using IDREF) are valid. Based
| on this, two Topic Maps may use the same IDs while both of them are
| valid by themselves. When you merge them into one document, you will
| have to unify the IDs and IDREFs by replacing them in at least one
| of the two source documents. This means: IDs are a moving target -
| as long as I cannot asure that nobody else in the world uses the
| same IDs like me.

Actually, there are three standardized (or to-be-standardized) ways of
identifying a topic:

  1) by giving the URI of one of the topic's subject indicators,
    (provided it has any, of course),

  2) by giving the URI of the topic's subject, (provided the topic
     actually does represent an information resource with a URI), or

  3) give a URI that points to the topic's <topic> element. (This must
     of course make use of the ID.)

As you can see, none of these are subject to the ID collision problem.
So this is actually a problem that topic maps do not have.

| I am currently implementing a Web Service that gives access to a
| topic (or a ranked topic list) by several search conditions
| (including basename, of course).

This sounds very interesting. Is this web service described anywhere?

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >