[topicmapmail] A somewhat new topic maps format

[Jason Cupp]

> Murray Altheim wrote:
| If I'd stayed at Sun I was hoping to participate (I had the invite) in
| the US Federal Govt. XML Working Group. I think their 
| geospatial metadata
| spec is very cool, but off the top of my head I can't remember its
| relationship with ISO 19115. While not thinking about the 
| creepier aspects
| of the standard (like Big Brother keeping track of where I am 
| standing,
| or launching missiles at that spot), it's rich with 
| possibilities, just
| like the Comprehensive Bunny Name List. 

The Content Standard for Geo Spatial Metadata (CSGSM) it curretly mandated
for all federal agencies to use. ISO 19115 and 19119 are the ISO Geo Spatial
Metadata Standards. The FDGC will adopt a version of ISO when it becomes
finalized, then the National standard will be a profile of the
international.

The ISO standard is being developed by TCs out of www.digest.org, which
military (NATO), so you're not far off the bullseye...

And you're right -- talk about markup, the standards quite large & full of
semantics. In development is a national portal (http://www.geodata.gov/)
developed by ESRI (I'm on ESRI's metadata team). The portal is a big
metadata application, but works with only CSGSM metadata and documents
conforming to an ISO draft. There are many other XML applications being
developed at the federal level with geo-spatial semantics, meaning that for
the portal to grow, we need something like topicmaps, RDF, ontologies,
thesauri, gazetteers to drive the portal... fun!

- Jason