[topicmapmail] Collaborative construction of TMs

[Lars Marius Garshol]

Hi Alexander,

* Alexander Nakhimovsky
|
| Suppose someone constructs an Architecture Topic Map with
| information on famous buildings (architect, style, date built)
| including La Scala. Let's assume that the topic IDs for famous opera
| houses are the same as in the Italian Opera topic map. (I'm actually
| not sure that this is relevant to my question, but just in case.)

When you say IDs, do you mean the values of the 'id' attributes of the
<topic> elements? If so, those do not affect merging. The best way to
ensure merging is to use subject indicators, so you would need to
ensure that the La Scala topic in the Architecture TM shares a common
subject indicator with the same topic in the Opera TM. 

The Opera TM doesn't have any indicator on this topic, but you could
solve that like so:

  <topic id="la-scala">
    <!-- ... -->
    <subjectIdentity>
      <subjectIndicatorRef xlink:href="opera.xtm#lascala"/>
    </subjectIdentity>
    <!-- ... -->
  </topic>

| How would one integrate the information of the Architecture TM into
| the Opera TM short of merging the two?

Why would you not want to merge the two? Because the Architecture TM
contains lots of stuff that is not interesting in the Opera TM, such
as Tower Bridge, the Eiffel tower, and so on?

If so, the way to do it would be to use some application that can
extract a fragment of one topic map (so that you could pull out
certain topics from the Architecture TM with all necessary information
and typing topics) and then merge that with the Opera TM. That should
work just fine.
 
| I tried to think of an example of orthogonal TMs, with
| non-overlapping sets of properties. My primary interest is
| procedural: how would one assign orthogonal topic maps to different
| teams and then integrate their work?

Basically, as long as you agree on subject indicators for the topics
that occur in the TMs produced by different teams simple merging
should do the job. Or did I miss one of your requirements?

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