[topicmapmail] Expressive capabilities of Topic Maps

[Miles Thompson]

Hmmm

The way I look at it. A lot of the criticisms of TopicMaps vs RDBMS, are
really criticisms of XML as opposed to RDBMS technology.

XML strengths are as an *interchange* format, as a *standards* engine.
XML-as-storage-engine is definitely a poor cousin to storage in an
RBMS-engine. It is not as mature, easy to use, or anywhere near as
efficient as RDBMS for storage.
 
However, I think the arguments *for* TM over RDBMS (in real world
applications) are not to do with the 'XML' represenation of TopicMaps.
The strength of TM is in *model* which has a much higher level of
abstraction (away from the specific problem domain) than your typical
RDBMS implementation. 

So I guess its really your standard trade off - the higher level of
abstraction in Topic Maps gives greater flexibility (i.e. no development
time to add 'attributes' to your model of a 'person', the ability to
automagically 'merge' information in one  knowledge base with another
etc, etc) but there is a corresponding price in terms of performance,
verbosity, etc. Also, the downsides are excerbated by the lack of mature
tools.

Just my random 2c

--

miles