[topicmapmail] Web Services

[Murray Altheim]

Jan Algermissen wrote:
> Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> 
>>* Thomas B. Passin
>>|
>>| 1 - How should you ask for some relevant part of a topic map (so as
>>| to avoid getting the whole thing when it is not needed)?
>>
>>Two mechanisms have been discussed so far: give an identifier for the
>>topic you want, or run a query.
> 
> Over the last months I have been working on a third approach, that focusses
> on accessing topic maps on the Web. 
> 
> The idea is that a topic map server can make certain portions of a topic map
> available, that suit common information needs. Some examples of such portions
> are
> 
>   - the 'index' of a topic map, meaning the list of topics with their
>     occurrences and the titles,abstracts,authors, etc. of the occurrences
> 
>   - the 'reverse index', meaning the list of information resources and the
>     subjects they are occurrences of
> 
>   - the list of all classes
> 
>   - the list of all roles
> 
>   - the list of all assertion types
> 
>   - several forms of hierarchical structures, such as a superclass-subclass
>     tree or a spatial-containment tree
> 
>   - hitlists based on certain properties/situations of topics
> 
> many of these are present in the available topic map browsing softwares in one
> form or another.
> 
> The above conceptual portions can also be parameterized in order to 
> retrieve only certain substes (e.g. index from A-C or some tree starting
> at X and going down n levels)

Jan,

Rather than continue to ask spurious questions about details, I'll
just start at the top.

Just before Christmas I wrote a tiny HTTP server and embedded it
within Ceryle. This was primarily for serving up internal documenta-
tion, forms handling, and I'm now planning to use it to access
contents from the internal database. But I've long been thinking
about something similar to what you're talking about above.

Do you already have a "query API" for these kinds of things? If so,
are you willing to share it? If not, would you be interested in
working on one together? The list above is pretty similar to the
kinds of things I'd also be interested in obtaining from a Topic
Map. (You even mention spatial containment, and I've for the past
week been looking at implementation issues on mereology and
mereotopology).

Part of my motivation is to allow multiple Ceryle servers to
talk to each other.

It obviously would be a very good idea if there was a baseline
of functionality between online Topic Map servers.

Murray

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

   [...] all matters of authority and responsibility are ultimately
   matters of social practice, and never matters of ontology (that
   is, never just a matter of how things in fact are in the nonhuman
   world). [...] just as we should not look to ground our moral
   judgments in the nonhuman authority of a god, so we should not
   look to ground our empirical judgments in the nonhuman authority
   of an external world.                          -- Robert Brandom
   http://www.tilgher.it/brandom.html