[topicmapmail] Fragmented XTM for web metadata, and some ontology?

[Murray Altheim]

Alexander Johannesen wrote:
 >
 > Christoph Froehlich <cfauto@folge2.de> wrote:
 >
 >> did you see Jan Algermissens thoughts about expressing
 >> Dublin Core in Topicmaps?
 >> http://www.topicmapping.com/dc.html
 >
 > Excelent, just what I'm looking for. Anyone disagreeing
 > with this method? If not, I'm thinking of implementing
 > this model in a proxy all can use to browse the net with
 > TMs enabled. :)

Alexander,

It's a shame we didn't get the association templates stuff done while we
still had TopicMaps.Org going, but at the time we didn't think it was
quite ready for prime-time, and couldn't get consensus of what was needed
or correct. So it's difficult to advocate using psi1.xtm given its lack of
consensus in the community *as* a community-level document. Which is not to
say it shouldn't be republished as a document under a different status.

Granted that psi1.xtm is still available on the website, it probably
should be removed, or at least its status changed from "release" to
something more appropriate, since it really wasn't approved by the group
in the end. (It's perhaps hard to imagine the rushed climate of those days
in December, trying to meet our self-imposed deadline.)

Not commenting on the methodology, but the PSIs you've used have no
formal bearing, as they are part of a unofficial topic map and use concepts
such as association templates that are not current with any specification.

So from that basis it's a bit difficult to accept as a community-level
endeavour, though certainly the idea of DC-in-XTM is a good one. I think
several of us have done similar things* (I've got a DC-in-XTM topic map
in my rucksack too). If you could rebuild this with either the XTM 1.0
PSIs or your own rather than the obsolete PSI document this would be
preferable (IOW, republish the PSIs of the psi1.xtm topic map, changing
the base URI to something of your own making, perhaps at a PURL). You
could produce a similar approach to DC-in-XTM without resorting to
the association template PSIs.

Murray

* see http://www.altheim.com/specs/meta/NOTE-xhtml-augmeta.html for an
   unfinished draft, which might provide some ideas. This failed to get
   Sun's backing as a project and got sidelined amongst other things...
...........................................................................
Murray Altheim                         http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK                    .

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