[topicmapmail] Mapping files?

[Kal Ahmed]

On Fri, 2003-02-21 at 04:48, Guy Murphy wrote:
> I just has a gander at the paper of Mr. Udell that was referenced and I
> didn't see any hijacking going on.
> 
> What I saw was somebody trying to identify a subset of TopicMaps that was
> immediately useful to web developers / users, and that said same were likely
> to be able to grasp and run with quickly. Once you get people to that point,
> it's quite easy to provide the fine points after if / when they become more
> interested, as demonstrated by Joshua.
> 
> If this is hijacking then I'd say we're in desperate need of more hijacking
> in order to popularises topicmapping. I'd prefer to see more "topicmapping"
> going on, and less "Topic Maps" myself.
> 

But if you define "topicmapping" as sticking a title on a bunch of
links, how is that going to communicate the true power of topic maps ?
For every one person who looked at that article and had the technical
curiousity and drive to find more information about topic maps from
sources such as this list, I would be willing to wager that there was at
least one other and more likely 10 other readers of that article who
know believe that they know that topic maps are just a cool way of
organisisng book marks. And that annoys me. There are much better
articles on O'Reilly about topic maps (as I understand them).

Besides, the question was about the "mapping file" format. I feel
duty-bound to point out that Mr. Udells "mapping file" is
a) not a topic map because it does not provide typing, scoping or
aggregation facilities
b) not an interchangeable topic map format that will be recognised by
any topic map processing tool

Cheers,

Kal