[topicmapmail] Web Services

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Miles Thompson
| 
| I was wondering if there is anybody out there that knows of a
| webservices layer that can be sued to communicate with a 'topic map
| server' hopefully one of the fully featured ones.

Actually, there is ongoing work to create one. See

  <URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/snapi >
 
They don't have much in the way of info there yet, but at least you
can get the current documents from the CVS.

| The reason I ask is because there may potentially be a need to
| bridge the gap between Microsoft.NET C# and a topic map server,
| which I imagine doing by means of passing TMQL wrapped in a web
| services envelope and receiving XML results wrapped in a webservices
| envelope (which would then be either just displayed for update or
| presentation via XSLT or perhaps manipulated after instantiation
| into C# objects - which I know creates a need for some sort of TM
| representation on the C# side anyway).

This would be one of the many use cases for SNAPI. In fact, today I
had a customer request this for a large topic map-based project, so
this does seem like quite a hot thing.
 
| Also implicit in this is the concept of a 'topic map server' that
| acts something like a database server in that it receives queries or
| updates and returns data. I would be interested to hear if in real
| applications people made such a 'break' between layers inside their
| application or if they found it impractical to work like that.

Not sure exactly what you are asking here. Could you expand?

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