[topicmapmail] Re: Simplifying XML Topic Map authoring?

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Dean Allemang
| 
| For how much longer will this be true?  One hopes that when
| something becomes a standard, the market opens up, and a number of
| players can jump in with their own offerings.  I would hate to have
| to use only Java compilers made by Sun, or VB environments built by
| MS, or web browsers from NCSA, although at one time, those were the
| only choices.  Can we expect the Topic Maps standard to break out
| one day and become more than the sum of its parts, with an open
| community of vendors, solution providers, contractors, researchers,
| etc. all being able to contribute to it?

I certainly hope that that day will come, and in fact I'd say that it
is pretty much here already. There are quite a few topic map software
offerings out there, both commercial and open source. 

As regards whose software one should trust, well, work is underway to
produce a conformance test suite that will allow anyone to test
whether the TM software they are being offered is conformant or not.
I believe that's the way to decide between products, not based on who
wrote the software or the standard. To use an analogy, the right thing
for XML is not to have everyone use Lark as their XML parser...

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