[topicmapmail] Expressive capabilities of Topic Maps

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* jalgermissen@topicmapping.com
| 
| Duh...a little late for me to answer *you* ;-)

No problem. :)
 
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| I would do something like the following (using $COL for column
| references):
| 
|   [person$ID : person = "$FIRSTNAME $SURNAME"; "$SURNAME $FIRSTNAME"
|                       = "$FIRSTNAME" / given-name
|                       = "$SURNAME" / surname]
|   {person$ID, birthdate, [[$BIRTHDATE]]}
|   
| City and country I would be strongly tempted to do with associations,
| but if we are to go your route then the rest of the table follows the
| pattern set by the birthdate.
 
* jalgermissen@topicmapping.com
|
| Forgive me, I don't speak LTM....[[ ... ]] denotes an occurrence
| with resource data..yes?

It does.
 
| The problem I have with this is that this will recognize the
| birthdate as a subject or (using the SAM draft) at least the
| relationship between the person in question and the birthdate. 

Correct.

| Since within the RDBMS the birthdate is a simple property of the
| person this does not satisfy me.  It creates overhead that is not in
| the original data. Furthermore, I'd have to tell my (imaginary)
| client that all simple properties of her millions of person entities
| will create this overhead....

 a) Topic maps never had a notion of "simple properties", so what did
    you expect?

 b) The data model draft says what the structure of a topic map is,
    but *not* how to store it, so what the overhead of an occurrence
    is depends on the implementation.
 
| Any other ideas?

No.
  
| I must admit that I am not up to date on TMCL, is this already
| early-drafted somewhere?

No, there is currently no TMCL draft, only a requirements document:
  <URL: http://www.y12.doe.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0405.htm >
 
Comments on this are very much wanted by both the authors and the
committee, either here, on sc34wg3, or on tmcl-wg.

| 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 think Tom answered this pretty well. 

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