[topicmapmail] The potential of TM fragments

[Carlo Moneti]

Hi,

I am new to topic maps and new to this list. I hope this question is 
appropriate:

RDF is stored in each document. TM is stored in one place and describes 
many documents (or is just a template of generic topics and their 
interrelations with yet unconnected content). RDF can be aggregated in one 
place as well. It seems self-evident that standalone documents (which they 
would be at time of creation) would benefit from included metadata so that 
their metadata isn't lost when  they get moved around. 
This led me to wonder, what type of TM data can intelligently be embedded 
in a document? I imagine a topic defining itself, consisting of strictly 
internal references plus references to PSIs, would make sense as a 
standalone TM fragment. However, after harvesting this metadata from, say, 
1000 such documents, you'll still have a lot of work ahead to define the 
useful associations among the documents; you can't define associations 
until you have aggregated some topics and have formulated the relevant 
association-types. My question is, is there a way to define TM fragments in 
documents so that when harvesting them, a rich TM can be automatically 
generated?

In trying to answer my own question, this is what I came up with:

1. if there exists a rich set of PSIs,
2. if the fragments use PSIs everywhere,
3. if the documents are of the same knowledge domain,
4. if you already have a TM template that defines all of the topic-types,
   association-types, and the associations among those topic-types for that
   domain,
   then, it seems you would have all the bits of information necessary to 
process the harvested fragments and the TM template into a rich map. Is 
this roughly correct?

Thanks,
Carlo