Re: [topicmaps-comment] mapping topic maps on a relation database

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

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| BTW, how far did you get with TouchGraph visualization? I tried it
| out myself briefly (a 1-hour Jython hack on top of our engine), and
| while it did very well for small topic maps (5-40 topics) it didn't
| do at all well for larger things like the Italian Opera topic
| map. Have you been able to get round that problem somehow? (I have
| some ideas about how to do it, but would be curious to hear yours.)

* Murray Altheim
| 
| Send me the LTM file and I'll see what it does. 

The Italian Opera topic map only exists as XTM at the moment:
  <URL: http://www.ontopia.net/omnigator/docs/opera.xtm >

If you want an LTM file you can use i18n.ltm (which is LTM 1.2):
  <URL: http://www.ontopia.net/omnigator/docs/i18n.ltm >

| As I mentioned, merging isn't completely functional (eg., it
| currently doesn't merge associations at all, or topics playing the
| same role in associations), but it does do most.

That shouldn't make any difference for these two topic maps. None of
them make any use of merging, as far as I can remember.
 
| As for size, I've hit limits on memory before there's real problems.
| I've opened up ITIS files with hundreds of topics, so there
| shouldn't be a problem with 5-40.

No, I didn't have problems with 5-40, but opera.xtm has 893 and
i18n.ltm has 634, and in these cases TouchGraph just made a big mess
with lots of topics on top of each other connected all ways. That was
the problem I was thinking of.
 
| [I'd hoped to have Ceryle ready for release this week, but it's
| looking now like next week... still some missing functionality and a
| few bugs I want to kill before a first viewing.]

I'm looking forward to having a look at it. 

There's enough topic map engines out there now (OKS, K42, Mondeca,
Nexist, TM4J, XTM::Base, tmproc, Ceryle, XTME, and probably some more)
that getting an XTM test suite out is getting quite important.

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