[topicmapmail] tagging vs topics

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* James David Mason
|
| What Tony points to is something that's coming up in my work, too. I
| need to deal with lots of little pieces of text. I hate to think
| about managing them individually, but I can't get them easily into
| XTM because some of them include little bits of internal markup
| that's really essential (like "<sup>235</sup>U". 

This is a reasonable requirement: you want to have XML fragments as
occurrences of topics. Nothing stops you from doing that, though.
In fact, there are several different ways of approaching this:

 a) put them in your XTM document with <![CDATA[  ]]> around them,

 b) put them in an LTM file where you don't need to worry about
    escaping,

 c) put them in a separate file and link to them from your XTM file,

 d) put them in a CMS and link to them from your XTM file, or

 e) use a fancy CMS with TM integration that lets you just magically
    *do* this, without worrying about references or escaping or
    anything. (This last option isn't available right now, but that's
    just a matter of time.)

All of these are fully possible with XTM, and although I've also been
thinking about allowing any XML element to be child of <resourceData>
I'm not sure that would make anything easier for anyone.

| I really want to have this markup in the text that I'm moving around
| in XTM because I want to display it from within a TM browser.

To do that you will have to use a TM browser that lets you run
occurrence resources through transformations as part of the browsing
process, and you'll have to set up an appropriate transformation.
This is really no different from the situation you would have been in
had XTM supported arbitrary XML content in <resourceData>.

I am really surprised to see that people consider the interoperation
of XML and XTM to be so difficult. To me it seems very
straightforward, but perhaps that means I should write a paper on it.
That way we could find out whether I am missing something or whether
it really *is* straightforward.

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