[topicmapmail] Topic Maps in a DBMS

[Thomas B. Passin]

[Alexander Johannesen]

> I'd still like someone to create a workable and plugable RDBMS system
> for topic maps that coupld be used for a lot of times when the customer
has
> invested a lot in their RDBMS and feel reluctant to
> start from scratch with something mystiqe as TM. :)
>

I don't see an automated system ever being able to completely overylay a
topic map onto a relational database, and for two reasons.  First, there are
often more semantics than are captured by just the existence of the primary
and foreign keys (which an automated method would have to rely on).  Second,
an automated system is not going to be able to cope with the design of
denormalized tables in the general case.  One would have a better chance if
one created a set of fully normalized views with simple semantics (or at
least as simple as possible) and worked with them.

Cheers,

Tom P