[topicmapmail] (no subject)

[Lars Marius Garshol]

Hi there,

* racker17@gmx.de
| 
| 1. what is the latest trend in the development process of TMQL --- is
|    there just the requirement specification and the official proposal
|    published by SC34+Topicmap.org or anything else?

What Holger wrote applies, but you may want to look at the guide
document linked to from
  <URL: http://www.isotopicmaps.org/ >

| 2. is the purpose of TMQL just to define a standard of requirements or
|    is it developed to be an explicit query language (I suppose the
|    latter)?

You may not mean precisely what you write here, but TMQL does not
exist yet. We have the requirements, but that's all. Nobody knows what
the language will look like or what approach it will follow.

| 3. is it right that TMQL is integrated in empolis k42 (in a special
|    form called eTMQL --- I suppose that stands for "empolis TMQL")?

The only relationship between eTMQL and TMQL is that they are both
topic map query languages. (Of course, the TMQL standard will make use
of Empolis's experiences with eTMQL.)

| 4. in what way are TMQL and Ontopia's Tolog related to each other,

In exactly the same way that TMQL and eTMQL are related.

|    what are the special benefits of Tolog and where are possible
|    disadvantages compared with TMQL?

Well, tolog exists, while TMQL does not yet. For the moment that's a
hands-down victory to tolog.

As regards special benefits experience has shown the language to be
very good for querying relationships, and people seem to have an easy
time learning it. We've also found it to be simple to implement, and
amenable to different implementation approaches.

The disadvantage is chiefly that it only lets you query on
associations, leaving names, scopes, occurrences, and similar things
out of reach. We are very satisfied with the language, however, so we
intend to fix it by extending to cover these things.

| 5. do you have any information of the development of other topic map
|    query languages and their features and possible advantages
|    (e.g. AsTMa? from the Bond University of Australia ...)

Regarding AsTMa? Robert Barta is the person to ask. The people behind
the Gooseworks topic map engine[1] are also making a query language,
but I expect they will tell you about it themselves.

[1] <URL: http://www.goose-works.org/ >

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