[topicmapmail] graphic language for describing TopicMaps

[Murray Altheim]

Thomas B. Passin wrote:
> Stefan Lischke wrote:
> 
> 
>>I'm just writing a complete documentation about a content management 
>>system with topicmaps i builded. Therefore i have to describe a lot of 
>>topic maps and PSI sets.
>>When i had done this work with plain XML, i could describe the data 
>>structure with XSD. But since there is no TMCL i have to do it in a 
>>visual way with digrams.
>>But is there a standardised way of creating a digram which describes a 
>>topicmap or a topicmap typesystem which does not only include topics, it 
>>also includes association types with specified roles and cardinalities.
>>
> 
> 
>  > How are you guys describing your topicmaps? Are you using rectangles for
>  > topics and circles for associations, how do you show that something is
>  > scopeable?
> 
> I like to draw them as rectangles for topics and ovals for associations. 
>   Sometimes I use hexagons (stretched out) for occurrences.  I haven't 
> felt a need to show scopes, by and large, but that could be doone 
> various ways, like another association (but that's complicated), or the 
> name of a scopeing topic in brackets (more compact).
> 
> But it depends on what you want to show.  E-R, as Jan said, can be good too.

Most of the visual graph languages I've seen use a similar approach,
even things like Conceptual Graphs (CG) do the same. I've been
displaying context as an oval. CG does it as enclosing boxes, which
I find a bit ugly, though I've not built an alternative yet. In the
plans....

My graphs are bipartite, so just changing the relation shape and
connecting the context to the association itself makes the most
sense AFAICS. Here's a sample:

    "Moby Dick is a Whale in a Fictional Context"
    http://www.altheim.com/ceryle/img/plants.png

You can see here an example of context, plus the beginnings of a
subgraph (currently not finished, just experimenting).

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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