[topicmapmail] Announcement of XML Schema for ISO 13250 Topic Maps

[David RR Webber]

Message text written by "Martin Bryan"
>When people start to create topic maps they will
almost certainly create a single type of occurrence, and will not assign
them roles. As time goes on and they try to relate their maps to other
peoples maps, they will begin to understand how vital roles are to
differentiating the reasons why occurrences were assigned to topic maps.
When we come to trying to use multiple maps as a single whole we will find
that there will increasingly be a need to restrict our queries based on the
reasons why specific occurrences were assigned to particular topics. (You
have only got to look at the web to see how vital the "reason for
publishing" data on any subject is.)
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Martin,

This is exactly the same problem that the W3C has punted on for
Schema - and the only viable solution is to bite the bullet on 
Registry services and the UID mechanisms within the XML itself
to provide seamless semantic referencing.

Anyway this problem is at the heart of the billlions of $$$ spent 
annually on data synchronization.

It is not new.  When SQL was developed there were proposals
to capture semantic meaning at the COLUMN level within a 
TABLE.   These were rejected and instead the system of 
implied semantics thru primitive datatyping and 15 letter 
human readable names became the approach.

The reason it was rejected was because databases were
still a relatively 'new' technology - especially on the PC,
and it was felt users would not cope with the level of 
complexity required.

Those same issues are still here today.  Being able to 
quickly locate and reuse items based on business context
and domain are what we are striving to provide.  If ebXML
can pull it off - we will have entered a new dawn.

Even now though there are serious issues in Registry
implementation specifics - and my feeling is that vendor
politics are going to delay the real implementations by
another year here.  I hope I'm proved wrong!

DW.