[topicmapmail] Expressive capabilities of Topic Maps

[Thomas B. Passin]

[<jalgermissen@topicmapping.com>]

> Well, I am curios to see what people think about using topic maps as
> a competitor for the relational model. Suppose you go into a company
> that wants to create a large database (e.g. customer data, geographic
> data, ...) when would you suggest using the relational model and when
> topic maps? (assumed that TM tools have the same maturity as RDBMS)
>

I try not to think of TM and RDBMS as competitors.  First of all, if you
have regular data that is well-modeled by a table structure, you should use
a relational database, since they are highly evolved and efficient at
handling that kind of data.  In this case, a topic map overlay can be very
useful, either for integrating several databases or for providing navigation
for the database.  No need for competition here.

Second, it can happen that a relational database is designed (more or less)
according to a topic map design, even if it does not implement everything in
the TM standard(s).  In that case, the database __is__ a topic map, to all
intents and purposes.  You may want to put a topic map wrapper over it for
data interchange purposes.

Third, if your data is more like a set of sparse tables, or is irregular in
its structure, topic maps are likely to work much better than an ordinary
relational database (given your assumptions about maturity, so that CRUD and
transaction issues would be handled effectively).

Cheers,

Tom P