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

[Steve Pepper]

* Andreas Fleck
|
| but how do I handle the columns? I´ve read a paper from ontopia,
| which says that columns should be mapped as occurances.

Hi Andreas,

I'm curious about *where* you read this because it is not strictly
accurate. For tables that are the semantic equivalent of a topic
type (e.g., your "Software-Tools" table), some columns will typically
map to occurrences whereas others will map to names, identifiers, or
associations with other topics (via foreign key relations).

There are also other kinds of tables (e.g., relation tables) where
none of the columns will map to occurrences. (They will mostly be
references to topics.)

All the above assumes that what you want to achieve is a semantic
mapping rather than an object mapping. (For the distinction between
these, see http://www.w3.org/TR/rdftm-survey/.)

Best regards,

Steve

--
Steve Pepper <pepper@ontopia.net>
Chief Strategy Officer, Ontopia
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3
Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps 1.0)