[topicmapmail] OpenThemicMaps v1.1

[Peter P. Jones]

Hi,

This might only be of incidental interest to the topicmapping 
heavyweights, or the world at large, but I've made an alteration to 
the OpenThemicMaps DTD (and schemas) to yield a new version, 1.1.
See 
http://purl.org/openthemic/openthemicmaps/1.1/dtd
for details.

The change is that the themicURI child element of the participant 
element now has a cardinality of '?' (one or zero) and not '*' (zero 
or more).

My reasoning goes like this:
I originally derived OTM from XTM by cutting away lots of stuff I 
didn't think I needed. But I left in a concession thinking it was 
harmless.
Associations in XTM 1.0 group member topicRefs with the same roleSpec 
together in the syntax. That might be OK for the indexing approach of 
XTM, but since I'm more interested in the crossover with knowledge 
engineering/modelling in OTM I've steadily reached the conclusion 
that it is pernicious.
My thinking is that it permits the (shorthand) creation of 
collections that are 
a) ambiguous as to identity and addressability, and
b) are underspecified in terms of their form: set/group/list.
So in OTM v1.1 I've decided to kill them off.

Since the OTMBuilder software never supported their creation anyway, 
it was relatively trivial to supply a minor update (v0.2.1a) to 
support the new version. v0.2.1a will therefore load OTMs created 
with v0.2a but will display a warning message in the console if they 
are version 1.0 documents.

If you've used other software to create OTMs with 'underspecified 
list' participants then OTMBuilder v0.2.1a will probably only load 
the last themicURI in the list. (But I haven't tested this, I'm just 
guessing.)

Best,
-- 
Peter
OpenThemicMaps http://purl.org/openthemic/