[topicmapmail] BeerTM

[Martin Bryan]

Lars Marius

> Peter Flynn first suggested the idea of creating a topic map ontology
> for beer, and this was picked up at XML 2003, where a number of people
> sat down to work out a sketch of such an ontology. Yours truly had pen
> and paper handy, and so recorded the outcome. What emerged has been
> recorded in the easytopicmaps.com wiki at
>
>   <URL: http://easytopicmaps.com/index.php?page=BeerTM >
>
> Any comments and suggestions on the ontology would be most welcome,
> either here on in the wiki.

You might like to split retailer down into "distributor" and "outlet" for
two reasons:

1) Many beers are distributed outside the immediate area of the brewery
through one of the standard distribution chains to outlets that range from
shops (true retailers direct to end-customers) to tied pubs (who sell the
beer on behalf of a different brewery: it is the second brewery that is the
customer of the first, but does not sell to end-customers directly.)

2) Beer festivals are not reatailers directly. They take money at the gate
for which you get so much free beer, without directly buying the beer.

Also notice that license type will need to be scoped by country. Even
Scottish rules cannot be applied in England and Wales, so you need 3-digit
country codes for the scopes :-)

Its a pity that the interesting facets, such as conditioning and whether or
not the beer needs to be pressurized prior to or during distribution were
not included. A key factor is length of time in barrel. Your draft beer v
lager beer is inadequate. You need to be able to distiguish stouts, porters,
ales, beers, pale ales, lagers and alcohol free products at the very least.
Germans will also want to distinguish true lagers (brewed using the rules of
the German legislation) from "foreign" lagers, and most countries
distinguish between native beers and "imported" beers.

Much thought and testing of the ontology is needed. I suggest field trials
to which all members of this discussion group are invited. I'm happy to host
the first such meeting here in the UK :-)

Martin