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

[Murray Altheim]

Andreas Fleck wrote:
> Thanks again Murray,
> 
> since i can only use non-commercial Topic-Map tools, the commercial Tools
> are already no opiton anymore for me.
> My Topic Map engine of choice is TM4J, as it looks really well developed and
> pretty mighty.

It's the one I've been using for the past three years in my own
software, and it was recently used in a New Zealand digital library
project. Kal's a very good engineer and the project has been around
a relatively long time.

>>You may wish to export from the Topic
>>Map tools a form suitable for visualizing in the chosen tool,
>>be that GXL or GraphML or whatever.
> 
> Oh, what is this? Until now i had the opinion that any visualization is can 
> bascially "feeded" with an XTM file.
> At least the TM4J visualisation component is feeded with LTM or XTM files
> and is able to show a tree view, a hyperbolic tree view (Hypergraph project)
> and a TouchGraph view.

I'm just suggesting that if you don't find a Topic Map visualizer,
you may also consider using a more general visualization toolkit,
with GXL and GraphML being two of the many different input syntaxes.
In other words, you would use TM4J to generate either XTM if you
had a good XTM visualizer available, or GXL or some other syntax
if you'd chosen a different visualization tool. You basically first
have to decide what your visualization will look like, what features
it will have (interactivity?), and select a tool and serialization
syntax suitable for that tool. Hypergraph and TouchGraph are both
fine, but don't scale well when dealing with large numbers of
visualized nodes, or when you have, say, three hundred subclasses of
a given Topic (as three hundred spokes around a wheel is a problem
for TouchGraph).

>>I myself haven't done an exhaustive survey of
>>all the visualization tools out there. Depending on how much
>>programming you yourself wish or are able to do will also impact
> 
> what is curcial to me, is that the visualisation component can be integrated
> into the Richt Client Platform Eclipse.

Then you probably ought to look at what visualization tools are
available for that platform and see what those tools permit as
an import syntax.

>>Perhaps someone else can chime in with some examples -- I think
>>there's a few web pages/wiki out there with stuff about this,
>>but I'm just stepping away from my computer (the sun is out and
>>this is England), so I'll not be back for awhile (at least five
>>minutes).
> 
> a few links would be great.

Indeed. Anyone on visualization tools for Topic Maps, or syntaxes
that XTM has been mapped to?

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                          http://www.altheim.com/murray/
Strategic and Services Development
The Open University Library
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

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