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

Tue, 31 May 2005 07:04:27 -0700

Based on something Roger Sperber said at Murray's blog [1],
I re-discovered the Simile project[2]. It's RDF-based, but
the ideas, particularly the projects related to
presentation, are worthy of a good look.

I am most pleased to see Bénédicte resurface in this
community. Her contribution to the XML Topic Maps book is
among the most-talked-about chapters.

Jack
[1] http://www.altheim.com/ef/
[2] http://simile.mit.edu/

On Tue, 31 May 2005 13:39:14 +0200
 Bénédicte Le Grand <Benedicte.Le-Grand@lip6.fr> wrote:
>Hello,
>
>Thank you Murray for this reference to my work ;)
>
>I agree with Jack, there is a lot to do in the field of
>topic maps
>visualization. 
>
>I had to focus on other subjects the last few years but I
>am still very
>interested in TM visualization and I would be glad to
>contribute in this
>area. I do not have much time for programming at the
>moment, but I would be
>glad to share my ideas.
>
>Best regards,
>
>Benedicte Le Grand
>
>-----Message d'origine-----
>De : topicmapmail-admin@infoloom.com
>[mailto:topicmapmail-admin@infoloom.com] De la part de
>Jack Park
>Envoyé : lundi 30 mai 2005 19:58
>À : topicmapmail@infoloom.com
>Objet : Re: [topicmapmail] Generating TMs out of
>relational Databases / How
>To?
>
>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
>> 
>
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