[topicmapmail] YALTM ("YALTM Ain't LTM")

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Rich Morin
| 
| Looking at the LTM Definition and Introduction (V1.3), however, I
| see no way to place a scope on _part_ of a topic.  What I do see is
| the ability to create more than one (cumulative) topic definition,
| possibly with varying scopes.  

What you call "topic definition" is probably a topic name, and, yes,
these can have scopes. So that effectively means you can scope each
part of a topic (each name, occurrence, or association).

| Here are some other areas of confusion:
| 
|    * What is the purpose of #TOPICMAP?  Does it make a global
|    declaration or does it alter the processing context for the
|    following statements?  Also, I don't understand the purpose of
|    the tilde.

The purpose of #TOPICMAP is very simple: it's there so that you can
give an ID to the topic map. And the point of that is that you should
be able to reify the topic map.

The point of the tilde is to make the syntax correspond to the syntax
used to reify associations, occurrences, etc. There's also a backwards
compatibility issue with version 1.2 there.
 
|    * #PREFIX seems to provide a (very limited) macro capability.  Is
|    there anything else going on?

Not really. It's just a way to make it easy to refer to topics. That's
all.
 
|    * Why can't MERGEMAP use the same ID name space?  Is this simply
|    an implementation detail or is there a fundamental problem?

The reason is basically that IDs are not meant to be globally unique,
and so it can well be that you want to merge in a file written by
someone else, where IDs can easily collide with your own without you
wanting the topics to merge. Having both #MERGEMAP and #INCLUDE means
you get to decide which of these behaviours you want.

[1] I think the latest TMDM still may say "source locators" here.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >