[topicmapmail] UDDI, semantics and XTM

[Murray Altheim]

Kal Ahmed wrote:
> Hi Max,
> 
> I think that Conal has already said all that I was going to add on this
> matter. The important thing is that you do not need to duplicate the
> information you hold about the entities - just the identity. Essentially
> you are creating a set of binding points in your topic map to which you
> can bind UDDI entities. If you think of a "UDDI domain" and a "Topic Map
> domain", then these binding point topics are the way to cross the chasm
> from one domain to the other (being rooted at the Topic Map domain
> side). You would need to do the same with RDF (rdf:about). There is no
> need for the binding points to copy anything more than the identity from
> the UDDI domain into the Topic Map domain unless you really want to.
> 
> Having said all that, there is no reason why an application could not
> present a topic map interface to a UDDI repository (mapping on the fly)
> - or indeed why a UDDI repository could not use a topic map as its
> store. After all UDDI only constrains the interchange syntax (and as I
> see in UDDI v2 at least, the lengths of certain values) - UDDI does not
> constrain the implementation to be an RDBMS or an XML database.
> 
> I have read through some of the UDDI v2 specs and AFAICS the basic
> structure of the v2 registry is pretty straightforward and could easily
> be represented by a topic map.
> 
> Hmmm - topic map enabled web services anyone ? :-)

Kal's correct -- there's no reason not to use a Topic Map store
for a UDDI repository.

The project I was working on when I left Sun was exactly this, a
UDDI document store in Xindice (it was just switching over from
dbXML at the time), with plans for a Topic Map framework to map
all the objects as necessary to enable reasonable queries. If I
were doing it now, I'd use TM4J's Ozone backend. At the time I was
building my own Topic Map engine.

The whole "Web Services" thing kinda drives me up the wall as just
another version of marketing-speak for what we were already doing,
and UDDI a poor substitute for the work going on at the UN, but
heck, to each his own... we got paid. What ended up in the Sun Web
Services Developer Pack included the Xindice DB and support for
UDDI (I think under Java WSDP Registry Server or JAXR), though I've
never much kept track of that after leaving, so you'd have to visit
the Sun website to see what's supported. There was quite a lot of
activity going on, though with my absence I don't think the Topic
Map ball got picked up by anybody else.

There's a lot of ways to skin a cat, if you like skinned cats.

Murray

[WSDP] http://java.sun.com/webservices/downloads/webservicespack.html
......................................................................
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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