[topicmapmail] TM for Linux desktop

[Murray Altheim]

Sam Hunting wrote:
>Murray Altheim wrote:
>[...]
>>Sam,
>>
>>Are you thinking command line or thinking GUI?
> 
> Definitely command line -- why I was diffident about intruding into a GUI
> discussion -- but heck, the subject line is "TM for linux desktop" and the
> command line is definitely part of that.

Well, I've been using linux for I think about seven years now, and
I think of it both as a desktop (like KDE) and as a command line,
so I wasn't sure what you meant.

>>A lot of Ceryle's
>>functionality is command line operable, from XML validation and
>>well-formedness checking, LTM and other format conversion to XTM,
>>etc.  If you meant command line, is there something specific you
>>had in mind?
> 
> See the first URL above, for my KT presentation. Basically, it seems to me
> that if its sensible to navigate the linux file system with its tree
> nature (ok, a graph with links) its sensible to navigate a topic map with
> its graph structure. One would cd to a topic, etc.

Well, "sensible" I leave to you to define. A very large or complex Topic
Map doesn't seem too sensible to navigate via command line, but perhaps
query. Some Topic Map structures are pretty complex under the rug, at
least mine are. But I think I get your point: treating it a bit like a
file system. I'll check out your presentation tomorrow -- it's getting
pretty late here.

>>Editing seems a bit difficult, but perhaps query if
>>we had a query language, etc.
> 
> Not perhaps so very hard, if we are dealing with URIs, names, and small
> chunks of #PCDATA most of the time (as at least with XTM we are or -- some
> would say should ;-) -- be doing. XSH makes it pretty easy to work at this
> level. Not that I'd want to author a humongous topic map in the shell, of
> course, but adding value to an existing map shouldn't be so hard.
> 
> Of course, there's lots of back end stuff to work out ...

Yeah. A lot so far as I can see. Having built up an application
that started on the command line (there wasn't a GUI for quite a
while), I've not spent that much time with it for months, but it
does things like:

   % ceryle -l ./data/authoring.ltm -o ./out/authoring.xtm

   % ceryle -l ./data/authoring.ltm -o /dev/null
        (for LTM validation, as normally it'd spit it to system.out)

   % ceryle -x ../../text/canasta.html (XHTML validation)

etc.

The difficulty I see in doing stuff from the command line isn't so
much the machinery behind the scenes or under the rug, it's trying
to figure out how you'd create an XUpdate-like syntax for XTM. I
think Kal has something along these lines in TM4J, and Ceryle uses
TM4J, so I may have more tools at my disposal that I had thought.
(Tolog?)

Yeah, and I should be asleep. 'night...

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

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