Suellen
Not really an answer, just maybe another (more stupid?) question ...
When you sent me that question privately, late (for me) yesterday, before pushing it to
the list, to try and guess if it was *really* a stupid question, I answered hastily "why,
no, go ahead, I have no idea myself of the answer ..."
Well, after reading Lars Marius's answer, and after sleeping a while, I figure that maybe
I did not catch the question very well, otherwise I should have pushed it maybe directly
to Nikita, and mention his chapter in the book ... What I understood actually is my own
stupid question, rephrasing yours by missing one word:
> 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 XSLT stylesheet to handle it.
Note that what is missing is *write* before XSLT ... which makes all the difference. And
to this question, are there any free TM out-of-the-shelf stylesheets around? I guess the
answer is no. As Nikita explains quite well in the quoted chapter, you have to adapt your
stylesheet to your TM specific structure, and singularly the templates (association types,
role types, occurrence types) used in your TM.
If you don't do that, well ... see an example where you know the subject :)
http://mondeca-publishing.com/s/anonymous/title10163.html
The layout is obtained through XSLT transformation of automatic XML output of Mondeca data
base. The layout is generic, whatever the types of topic and associations, which is indeed
a lazy and suboptimal solution.
If you go to http://mondeca-publishing.com/s/anonymous/title10013.html, you can say it's
quite messy and I will agree. The generic stylesheet gives a poor rendition of information
here and there. To my defense, in that very case, since it was a sandbox where I've kept
trying new association types, generic stylesheet was the only way to do it.
For specific customer applications, we develop specific stylesheets adapted to both
specific model and templates, and to customer look and feel. The model is generally
defined before, and you don't get into the Semantopic mess :))
That's another reason why we need libraries of templates for widespread simple (I won't
say standard) association types, like e.g. those expressed in Thesaurus, or in Dublin Core
metadata ... If we had that stable templates, smart XSLT developers could provide
out-of-the-shelf stylesheets allowing non-technical, non-fortunate (or simply lazy) people
to publish their TM at low cost, and without going through the hassle of specific XSLT
development. We're not there, but that's a way to go.
Hope that helps
Bernard
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Bernard Vatant
Consultant - Mondeca
www.mondeca.com
Chair - OASIS TM PubSubj Technical Committee
www.oasis-open.org/committees/tm-pubsubj/
-------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Message d'origine -----
De : "Lars Marius Garshol" <larsga@garshol.priv.no>
À : <topicmapmail@infoloom.com>
Envoyé : jeudi 29 août 2002 00:57
Objet : Re: [topicmapmail] stupid question?
* Suellen Stringer-Hye
|
| 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?
Yes, it is. In fact, several people have done this. Nikita Ogievetsky
gave a presentation on this in Montréal 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.
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 >
--
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >
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