[topicmapmail] Generating TMs out of relational Databases / How To?

[Alexander Johannesen]

Hi,

On 5/30/05, Andreas Fleck <AndreasFleck@gmx.net> wrote:
> - Can anybody point me to a good tutorial or give me a recipe on how to d=
o
> this on the basic level (stuff like: Every Row of a Table has to be
> transformed into a topic)?`

Well, not so much a tutorial, but I do speak a bit about this in ;

   http://shelter.nu/art-007.html (scroll down to "From tables to nodes")

Also, you must check out this excelent article that pretty much talks
about doing things the other way (using RDBMS for Topic Maps), and
would give you a lot of clues as well ;

   http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/03/05/tmrdb.html

> - What ways of auto-generating Topic Maps out of RDBMS are there?

As many as there are RDBMS technologies, and then a few. :)

A better answer might be, as you suggest, to map each column in every
row to a topic, and then I would normalize the data. Usually you don't
want *everything* in the tables, as a lot of it is just makeup, lookup
and silly RDBMS baggage.

Here's my normal process ; map everything that matches a given
ontology to an intermediate XML, then use XML tools to normalise,
group and sort it into an XTM file, and then import this XTM file into
your TM engine of choice.

If you provide some more specifics, I'm sure people could provide
hours of fun and help.


Kind regards,

Alexander
--=20
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
                                                         - Frank Herbert
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