[topicmapmail] variantName for resourceRef?

[Thomas B. Passin]

[Ashish Mahabal]
>
> In some of my topic maps, I have rather long URLs as resourceRefs since I
> pass CGI-BIN URLs using parameters as parameters to another fully
> quoted CGI-BIN URL. These look too verbose when displayed completely.
> An example can be seen at:
>
http://avyakta.caltech.edu:8090/omnigator/models/topic_complete.jsp?tm=galaxies_s.xtm&id=astrostat
> under occurrence instances. (This topic map allows one to explore
> parameters in different astronomical catalogs, and through this
> external reference also allows one to run some statistical functions on
> choice columns of the astronomical catalogs.)
>
> Is there a way to shorten what is displayed by somehow using a fit-all
> string like "Astrostats" instead of the whole URL?
>

You could define entities in an internal DTD -

<!ENTITY astro
"http://avyakta.caltech.edu:8090/omnigator/models/topic_complete.jsp">

...
<resourceRef xlink:href='&astro;?tm=galaxies_s.xtm&id=astrostat'/>

Remember, in the parsed xml document, the entities get replaced by their
replacement text so you have not really changed anything about the URL.

Cheers,

Tom P