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

[Andreas Fleck]

Hi Alexander,
 
> 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
> do
> > 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

Thanks for the links i am giving them a read right now.

> > - 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.

OK, thanks, but how do I handle the columns? I´ve read a paper from ontopia,
which says that columns should be mapped as occurances.
But i got a problem in figuring out how to do this exactely. I mean If i
would have a column entitled "name" in a table called "address", it isn´t
what i would map as an occurance within a topic map, as "name", to me is a
seperate topic to me, not an occurance (which is mostly a website or picture
in the papers i´ve read through).


> 
> 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.

Oh, sorry to ask. But what do you exactly mean by mapping it to an
"intermediate XML"? What is this?
What can i understand exactly about the process of "normalising", "grouping"
and "sorting" it into an XTM file?

Well, at least i understand the last point of putting the XTM in the TM
engine of choice ;-) 

> 
> If you provide some more specifics, I'm sure people could provide
> hours of fun and help.
> 
i´ve posted a more specific describtion of my problem and scenario as an
anxwer to Murray´s kind post and i´m pretty glad, having found a list like
this, since none of the guys here at my place has a clue of topic maps ;-)


all the best
Andreas

> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Alexander
> -- 
> "Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
>                                                          - Frank Herbert
> __ http://shelter.nu/ __________________________________________________
> 

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