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

[Murray Altheim]

Thomas B. Passin wrote:
> [Kal Ahmed]
> 
> 
>>>As much as I understand and _somewhat_ agrees with that, it does not
>>>sound right for me to do "dc.date.publish == baseName". My thinking
>>>in terms of occurrences is that we could probably all get along much
>>>better if we deprecate "resourceData". :)
>>
>>Then we agree on that.
>
> We MUST HAVE some way to attach literal values somehow.  If we do not have
> resourceData, then where?  Well, we could use the data: scheme in a
> resourceRef, but that would make the data a URI and it would have to be
> URI-escaped.  Nasty.  The  upside is that it would make database and
> application design a little simpler (modulo URI escaping).
> 
> So I think that we shoul NOT depricate resourceData.  Instead, we should
> strengthen it so it can specify the type of the literal data it holds.

I see no particularly good reason to upset the apple cart at this
point. There are a growing number of applications based on XTM that
use <resourceData>, and it was agreed upon as a Good Thing by the
consensus of the group at the time. I would imagine that still to be
the case within the community.  I think XTM would be impoverished
without it, and any "damage" it causes is surely offset by its
benefit. [But I don't think either Kal or Alexander are too serious
about pushing for *real* deprecation. They just don't like it.]

Anyway, there is a way to use resourceRef without resorting to ugly
URI embeddings of data, and that's to use a query form of URI. I've
been considering including this in my Facet document since it might
be quite useful. Basically, an XPath can be used to point to any
node within an XML document, including Text nodes. So, with the
correct query string and an XPointer indicator, a URI could return
*just* a PCDATA value from a given XML resource, so you could use,
say, one XML document to contain all of your values, each referenced
via ID. Since XTM does not require that <topicMap> be the document
element, you could, say, deliver it wrapped within an XHTML document
whose resources are a bunch of <p id="foo"> elements that deliver
up the resources of the embedded topic map. You could "rich text"
the content in this way by XPath'ing to a specific XHTML element
that included mixed content.

Just some ideas floating around on my craneo-brainee'o...

Murray

......................................................................
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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