[topicmapmail] Stupid question---thanks

[Suellen Stringer-Hye]

Thanks to all and sundry. Your answers were extremely helpful but 
confirm my sense that unless you have a lot of development time 
and staff it is not really yet possible to publish Topic Maps freely 
on the web. 

For fun, here's a "real life" use case that I'm trying to execute to 
see if it might not be a good application for Topic Maps. It also 
illustrates how a Topic Map might lay on top of a database. Please 
feel free to critique my logic and intent. I see so many uses for 
Topic Maps in libraries but am looking for ways to integrate them 
with existing structures simply to show their value to the 
community. 

Libraries already have a lot of coded information stored in 
databases. Of course  this is very stable but  is not very good at 
things like cross references and what libraries call "authorities" i.e. 
tracking and synching up different versions of authors names etc....

For a test case I am using what is now a very small data set in a 
database on a portal website for Near Eastern Studies called 
ETANA. 

See 

http://lib11.library.vanderbilt.edu/diglib/abzu-processquery.pl?SID=&UID=&auth=&selectsearch=etana&searchstring=active

as you can see the database has records, coded with subjects but 
the subjects are not "cross referenced" i.e. I can't click on the 
hyperlink to generate all records in the database that have the 
subjects. So, for fun I thought I would see if a Topic Map would 
help in this regard (the whole thing could be done with a Topic Map 
but I'm starting small:>) Here's what I came up with as a very 
rudimentary Topic Map, subject coding the  three subjects of one 
record  for cross referencing. 

<topic id="Iraq">
 <instanceOf>
    <topicRef xlink:href="#book"/>
  </instanceOf>
 <occurrence>
    <instanceOf>
      <topicRef xlink:href="#website"/>
    </instanceOf>
    <resourceRef 
xlink:href="http://www.cwru.edu/UL/preserve/Etana/babyl_legal_and
_bus_docs_v6_pt2/babyl_legal_bus_docs_v6_pt2.htm/"/>
  </occurrence>
<occurrence>
    <instanceOf>
      <topicRef xlink:href="#record"/>
    </instanceOf>
    <resourceRef 
xlink:href="http://lib11.library.vanderbilt.edu/diglib/fulldisplay.pl/"/>
  </occurrence>
  <baseName>
    <baseNameString>Iraq</baseNameString>
  </baseName>
</topic>

<topic id="Mesopotamia">
 <instanceOf>
    <topicRef xlink:href="#book"/>
  </instanceOf>
 <occurrence>
    <instanceOf>
      <topicRef xlink:href="#website"/>
    </instanceOf>
    <resourceRef 
xlink:href="http://www.cwru.edu/UL/preserve/Etana/babyl_legal_and
_bus_docs_v6_pt2/babyl_legal_bus_docs_v6_pt2.htm/"/>
  </occurrence>
<occurrence>
    <instanceOf>
      <topicRef xlink:href="#record"/>
    </instanceOf>
    <resourceRef 
xlink:href="http://lib11.library.vanderbilt.edu/diglib/fulldisplay.pl/"/>
  </occurrence>
  <baseName>
    <baseNameString>Mesopotamia</baseNameString>
  </baseName>
</topic>

<topic id="Akkadian">
 <instanceOf>
    <topicRef xlink:href="#book"/>
  </instanceOf>
 <occurrence>
    <instanceOf>
      <topicRef xlink:href="#website"/>
    </instanceOf>
    <resourceRef 
xlink:href="http://www.cwru.edu/UL/preserve/Etana/babyl_legal_and
_bus_docs_v6_pt2/babyl_legal_bus_docs_v6_pt2.htm/"/>
  </occurrence>
<occurrence>
    <instanceOf>
      <topicRef xlink:href="#record"/>
    </instanceOf>
    <resourceRef 
xlink:href="http://lib11.library.vanderbilt.edu/diglib/fulldisplay.pl/"/>
  </occurrence>
  <baseName>
    <baseNameString>Akkadian</baseNameString>
  </baseName>
</topic>

<topic id="website">
  <baseName>
    <baseNameString>Full Text</baseNameString>
  </baseName>
</topic>

<topic id="book">
  <baseName>
    <baseNameString>Book</baseNameString>
  </baseName>
</topic>

<topic id="record">
  <baseName>
    <baseNameString>Record</baseNameString>
  </baseName>
</topic>


</topicMap>


A couple of notes on the above: 

1)The records in the database are pointers to web resources 
maintained internationally 

2)I'd like to be able to "plug-in" a perl script which is what the 
database currently uses for querying the data in order to point to 
the record "in the database" in this  instance. Ideally, I'd like to be 
able to use, in a Topic Map, the "Open URL" convention currently 
used in the library community for linking into external resources. 
This seems possible to me but don't know if it can work. 

3) Once I've created the Topic Map, I'd like to "export it" in some 
way to the Etana website and integrate it with the existing HTML. 


As I said, a very simple "use case", very difficult to execute. I'd love 
to hear your comments. And by the way many, many thanks to 
Ontopia for making the Omnigator available. It's great!


Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu