[topicmapmail] XTM Datatypes [Was: Adding weigths to associations]

[Martin Bryan]

Lars Marius
>
> It seems that you have two requirements here:
>
>  1) be able to define custom topic map syntaxes,
>
>  2) be able to represent certain constructs without having to define
>     topics to do so (facets, occurrence types, association types, etc)
>
> I sympathize with the first, but don't see that you need support from
> ISO 13250 itself to achieve it.

Other than the need to identify which constructs your custom syntaxes match
to in 13250 there is no need for support from the XTM syntax, but you do
need to flag at least the root element as being a topic map, just as the
HyTM syntax needs you to identify which of the AFs an element matches.

>The second one I don't understand the
> need for, but as I say, I'd be interested to hear why you think these
> two are important.

Note that I stated " XTM also requires the creation of extra "topics" to be
created to cover the roles used in 13250." Your response does not mention
role types, but I presume you would include these in your list as part of
the etc. If I want to retain information about the type of each role so that
I can select views of the topic map based on roles I presume you must expect
them to be re-constructed as topics within XTM.

>This is a third requirement:
>
>  3) be able to have XML markup in inline occurrences.
>
> This one I think many people want, and I think the only question here
> is whether the ISO committee will allow itself to make an extension
> like this. Personally, I'm leaning towards favouring this, but we'll
> have to see what the committee think.
>
> | Personally I don't believe this option should be restricted to
> | resourceData. There is certainly no such restriction in 13250.
>
> Not sure what you mean here. Could you explain?

13250 uses TMBrid to indicate those points at which you are allowed to
bridge out to non-HyTime forms. This occurs in dispname (which can be
non-textual, or could contain text with markup that affects the display,
such as bold and italics) and addthms (to allow comments to be used to
explain why the themes have been added), as well as part of the model for
the root element of a topic map (so that you can put in data that the topic
map can reference).

Martin