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

[Jack Park]

Visualization really is a large issue where large topic maps are in play.

Somewhat akin to representing topic maps in RDBMs is harvesting topic 
maps from existing RDBMS.  I've been asked to come up with an XLS 
spreadsheet which could be harvested to. The spreadsheet is easy for 
XTM: one template for topics and one for associations. Building a mapper 
that reads from arbitrary tables and writes to XLS is a bit more work. 
It's doable.

Jack

Murray Altheim wrote:

> 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
>