[topicmapmail] TM/XML

[Thompson, Miles]

Hello Lars,

That looks really interesting, exciting even!=20

The namespace-PSI relationship that you use is intuitively quite
appealing to me and I think will make a lot of sense to potential
TopicMap convertees. I also think the existence of a more user friendly
output has the potential to improve developer up-take of the whole Topic
Map idea.

In any event (and please forgive my ignorance as you've probably
addressed much of this elsewhere) here are some questions.

1. Would you say that anything expressible in XTM can be expressed in
TM/XML and vice-versa)? How about TMDM<->TM/XML equivalence (if that is
not the same thing). Is it true provided that the XTM is sufficiently
'typed' (Sorry, I forget what you lot call it when every topic and
occurrence has a super-type etc)?

2. The existence of the "XSLT style sheet for converting from TM/XML to
XTM" would seem to confirm the TM/XML -> XTM part of the above but you
actually be willing to use this in a real application? That is, does it
take a lot of CPU time or memory to process a large TM/XML fragment
using the XSLT style sheet approach?

3. I really like the idea that this format makes output data easier to
render (for presentation) using XSLT. Would you say that such XSLT
rendering was one of your main design goals when you came up with it?

4. When converting from the TMDM to TM/XML I'm not 100% clear how one
goes about 'cutting' the subject identifiers into namespace prefix and
element name - can you explain that a bit more?

5. I'm guessing it's possible to also automate the conversion from TMDM
to TM/XML (assuming that the above can be automated) at least modulo the
actual text used for namespace prefixes. Is that true and if so how do
you / would you go about it?

6. Finally, if Ontopia has developed tools for doing the above, are you
considering providing the code (or maybe just hints as to how to write
the code) so that other people can do the same?


Thanks

Miles Thompson
Technical Architect
mthompson@creditsights.com



-----Original Message-----
From: topicmapmail-admin@infoloom.com [mailto:topicmapmail-


I've written a blog entry about a new XML-based syntax for Topic Maps
that people may find interesting. The entry describes the syntax,
provides a RELAX-NG schema for it, and also an XSLT stylesheet for
conversion to XTM 1.0.

<URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/18.html >

--=20
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian   =20