Re: [topicmaps-comment] Topic Map or not for a taxonomy

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

Hello Heimo,

* Heimo Hanninen
| 
| To me CC and XTM are supplementary technologies, meaning automated
| topic map generation to provide taxonomies for a portal application,
| but I am learning that CC apps do not talk XTM.

This is the way I see it, too, but so far nobody's actually
implemented this bit. I guess what you could do is start telling the
vendors that you would like to see this functionality.
 
| -Custom built Taxonomy XML schema, requires more competence from all
| the parties, more emphasis on long term benefits, can be tailored
| for ideal match for information and process requirements, could be
| quite similar to "Topic Map Friendly W3C schema" as introduced in
| the Taxi report. Importing results from Classification tool and
| import/export to the Portal tool may be easier to provide using this
| approach.

Hmmm. What would this look like? Do you mean making an XML schema
specifically for your ontology and then having the CC produce output
in that form? And, presumably, importing from the specific XML schema
to your topic map portal? I guess that could work quite well, provided
the CC provides an XML export possibility. Of course, if it does you
might be able to output XTM directly.
 
| -Resource Description Framework (RDF), resource centric information
| management technology, can be used for describing topic hierarchies,
| well - are there any mature tools for editing and processing
| Taxonomy RDF instances, is anybody using RDF other than Open
| Directory? And it's missing the merging.

There are some RDF users out there, but it would be wrong to say that
it's really taken off. If your goal is a topic map there's not really
that much point in going CC -> RDF -> TM unless you have a special
reason to (CC tool outputs RDF).
 
| -RDF Rich Site Summary (RSS see:
| http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/files/specification.html) ,an RDF
| application, which is generally used for any situation when a
| machine-readable list of textual items and/or metadata about them needs to
| be distributed. There is even a taxonomy module draft available - but is
| anybody really using this either?

RSS is *very* widely used. It's perhaps the most widely used XML
application currently in use for publishing on the web. It got there
by being very simple, however, and so it's not really all that
interesting except as a case study. 

The structure of the information is *very* limited, so there's not
really all that much it can be used for. It's definitely not the
solution to your problems.
 
| -XML Topic maps,+++ , but I'm not sure if provides ideal support for
| processing documents, for example, facets are missing compared to
| from ISO model, which I originally thought using to store arbitrary
| metadata.

Facets are gone because XTM provides a much more powerful way to do
the same thing: create a topic and declare that it represents the
resource you want to attach metadata to. Then you can give your
resource names, occurrences, and let it participate in any
associations you want. This is really a much more powerful solution
than the original facets, which were really just a kind of reverse
occurrences.

| Powerful concept of Associations, but leads to frequent look-ups to
| find out which sub topics are contained under certain topic
| (child-parent relationship).

What do you mean?

| TMCL is also in the wish list - yet to come, so we may follow
| "Taxi's mpath approach".

You may be interested in the Ontopia Schema Language (OSL), then:
  <URL: http://www.y12.doe.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0268.htm >
  <URL: http://www.y12.doe.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0267.htm >

It's rather more powerful than the simple template approach, but most
likely the TMCL to come will be more powerful still.

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