[topicmapmail] newbie question on PSI

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* William Stewart
| 
| My question, I expect you may have guessed, is do I really need a
| separate web page for every single year in order to be able to quote
| a subject identifier. It seems this problem would merge in any
| quantitative situation where there can be a single generic
| definition and a large number numerically generated examples that
| one whiches to distinguish for merging.

This is an issue that's been on the issue list of the Published
Subjects TC, but which it has not gotten to discussing yet. However,
I think there are three things you can do here:

 a) what Kal suggests, which is probably going to give the best
    result, but which is also going to be the most work,

 b) to use an approach like http://www.example.com/years.html#2003
    where the years.html page basically explains how PSIs for years
    can be constructed and the anchor does not actually exist anywhere
    on that page (this works because human readers still understand
    what the PSI is supposed to mean), or

 c) just make URIs that don't point anywhere. This will still work, in
    the sense that no TM software will break because the URIs don't
    point to anything, but you will lose the documentation aspect
    where people looking at your TM can work out what the subject of
    each topic is just following a URI.

I think I would probably recommend b) as being the least work, but if
you don't mind doing a little bit of extra development a) is a good
alternative. In both cases it's probably good to include a little
metadata for the PSI set on the page(s) produced.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >