[topicmapmail] stupid question?

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Suellen Stringer-Hye
|=20
| I have a Topic Map. It works great when parsed by a propietary agent
| but I have no way of getting it on to the web without purchasing a
| vendor solution. Seems like I ought to be able to use a free parser
| and write an XSLT stylesheet to handle it. Is this possible?=20=20

Yes, it is. In fact, several people have done this. Nikita Ogievetsky
gave a presentation on this in Montr=E9al a couple of weeks ago, and Ken
Holman gave a talk on this subject last year. Jonathan Robie also gave
one presentation on using XQuery with topic maps.

| If so, can anyone point me to a tutorial or set of steps/tools
| making it possible to render an XTM document into XHTML without
| having to purchase anything?

These are the no-pay options:

 - use XSLT
     This is awkward, but provided the XTM conforms to certain
     conventions, manageable.

 - use XQuery
     Ditto.

 - use TM4J
     This is an open source topic map engine written in Java, which
     has a publishing solution based on Velocity. The TM4J web site
     <URL: http://www.tm4j.org/ > is built with TM4J.

 - use Perl::XTM
     This is another open source topic map engine, this time written
     in Perl. <URL: http://topicmaps.bond.edu.au/software/ >

 - use ZTM
     Yet another open source engine (Python/Zope). This one hasn't
     been released yet, but has been used to build several Norwegian
     web portals.=20

I hope this helps at least a little.

BTW: Here's one place where you can find such information

  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/xmltools/std_ix.html#S_XTM >
  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/xmltools/std_ix.html#S_TM >

--=20
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >