[topicmapmail] Collaborative construction of TMs

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| 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.

* Alexander Nakhimovsky
| 
| This was really my question. I was hoping for some equivalent of
| SELECT 

I am not sure what you mean exactly by SELECT. Do you mean the notion
of subsetting? If so, I think topic maps will have two different ways
of doing this. One being ordinary queries, another being fragment
extraction. I think this distinction will be necessary because these
two things (related though they are) are likely to have different
usage areas in topic maps.

At the moment there is a standards effort for querying in ISO,
currently on hold because the topic map models have to be completed
first. 

| and JOIN in the Topic Map world. 

Again, there is the difficulty of knowing what JOIN as applied to
topic maps is. If you mean merging then the procedure for that is
well-known and fairly well understood, although poorly specified at
the moment. The new model documents being developed by ISO *will*
describe this exhaustively and formally.

| Perhaps, if the operation is implemented in a generic way (e.g., by
| a bean that knows nothing about the subject matter of the TMs
| involved) then the implementation can be reused in multiple
| contexts.

It can. Ontopia's topic map engine has this operation implemented (in
the form of a method), and you can even access it in a user-friendly
way with our Omnigator. (See the 'Merge' link at the top of every
topic map page. Merging the factbook and opera topic maps may be a
good illustration.)

I think empolis's K42 also has this implemented, but I'm not sure if
any other implementations have this.

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