[topicmapmail] tagging vs topics

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* peter@poorbuthappy.com
|
| a simple question that I'm sure has been considered by you all
| before, but here it goes: topicmaps are great for assigning topics
| to articles, but what if you also want to *tag* certain parts of an
| article, ie. "The unrest in <country id="CO">Colombia</a> has ...".
| 
| Surely tagging is very useful as well. How do you combine tagging
| with topicmaps? What standards do you use for tagging?

I see this as an architectural issue. Topic maps are rarely used in
isolation (which applies to most other technologies as well) and so
this is the old problem of: what information am I going to maintain
where? 

It makes good sense to have a core topic map with information that
does not appear elsewhere, and then have a process that enriches that
topic map with information harvested from elsewhere (in this case XML
documents) to produce the full topic map.

In this case you can have your source documents in any form you want,
as long as you are able to make processes that harvest from them.
Ontopia is making a product that will help you do this, and I assume
other such products will also appear.

Does that help?

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