[topicmapmail] Collaborative construction of TMs

[Kal Ahmed]

At 12:40 07/04/2002 -0400, Alexander Nakhimovsky wrote:
>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.) How would one integrate the information of 
>the Architecture TM into the Opera TM short of merging the two?

Lars Marius has already covered this aspect of working with the topic maps.

>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?

In fact, your topic maps do have an overlapping set of properties - the 
subjects themselves (in your example, the opera houses). I would take this 
as the starting point for the collaborative effort. There are at least two 
ways to do this:

1) In close collaboration, work together to determine the subject 
indicators for the common properties (in this case, the common subjects). 
This then forms a single common "base topic map" which each team will use 
to create their specific TM.

2) Allow each team to work in isolation, developing the subjects as they 
go. Then as the "aggregator" of the information sets, create a third 
"mediating" topic map to record the overlaps (In the case of overlapping 
subjects, this can be done trivially by creating a topic which has the 
subject indicators of each overlapping topic as its subject indicators.

Both of these approaches allow the different topic maps to be developed 
independently, although (1) imposes more restrictions (similar to 
developing and using a controlled vocabulary). Both of these approaches 
also make use of the merging mechanism referred to by Lars Marius.

Cheers,

Kal