[topicmapmail] Compact Topic Maps Syntax -- A modest proposal

[Gabriel Hopmans]

Hello All,

The Compact Syntax for Topic Maps (CTM) has been approved as new work 
item at ISO. At the next ISO meeting in Seoul Professor Sam Oh and I 
will present work our (that is plus Lars Heuer) on CTM. Therefore we are 
preparing a presentation with amongs others:
- an short overview
- collected requirements and uses cases
- existing proposals and use case solutions
- feedback from the community and issues.

The document with the requirements have posted in the repository and the 
one but last version can be found at:
http://www.mssm.nl/materials/tmp/CTM-requirements.html

The latest version of the CTM use cases can be found at:
http://semagia.com/tmp/CTM%20UseCases.html 
<http://semagia.com/tmp/CTM%20UseCases.html>

Existing proposals are:
- AsTMa: http://astma.it.bond.edu.au/astma=-spec-2.0r1.0.dbk 
<http://astma.it.bond.edu.au/astma=-spec-2.0r1.0.dbk>
- LTM: http://www.ontopia.net/download/ltm.html
- PTM, python inspired syntax; no reference (yet?)
- proposal RDF N3 syntax inspired (see thread below)

Possible items for more discussion:
- How to write associations ? (see also thread below)
- more syntax proposals ?
- use cases that are not necessary ?

Any/more reactions will be very welcome!
Thank you and best regards,

-----

Gabriel Hopmans, Morphian




Steve Pepper wrote:

>Hi Thomas,
>
>| 
>| i'd like to give some remarks:
>| 
>| * '>' and '>>' don't seem intuitive to me.
>
>I understand your point and the same thought occurred to me.
>However, I tried with the more "intuitive" '<' and '<<' and
>it didn't seem right: it's as if the flow of reading left to
>right gets interrupted.
>
>
>| * why the use of paranthesis in this case:
>|         foaf:name "Giacomo Puccini" ( 'puccini, giacomo' /tm:sort/ ) ;
>|   but not in that case:
>|         dc:title "Madama Butterfly" , "Madame Butterfly" /lang:en lang:fr/ ;
>|   ?
>
>Because the first is a single base name with a variant, whereas
>the second is two separate base names (one of which is scoped).
>
>
>| * the way associations are handled is not intuitive.
>|   i would expect another ordering: first the subject, then the
>|   association-type, then the object(s).
>
>That is indeed the order in the data itself:
>
>   :tosca
>      music:composed-by  :puccini .
>
>However, it felt more correct to have the following order in the
>declaration of the template:
>
>   assoc-type  role-type1  role-type2  [...]  role-typeN .
>
>There are two reasons for this: (1) The declaration is basically
>making an assertion about the association type ("these are its
>role types"), hence the assoc-type is the "subject" and should go
>first. (2) An important purpose of the template is to specify the
>*order* of the role types; having the order "disrupted" by the
>assoc-type appearing second in the list is counter-intuitive.
>
>| but i think it's better to stick to the XTM-practice of holding 
>| associations seperate from topics
>
>In order to get full generality, this has to be an option. The
>templating mechanism only works when a single association type
>"signature" is used consistently throughout the topic map, and
>that will not always be the case. So my proposal does include the
>possibility of using the following (LTM-like syntax):
>
>   music:killed-by( :scarpia  > ex:victim
>                    :tosca    > ex:perpetrator
>                    :stabbing > ex:method
>   )
>
>which, in the presence of an appropriate template, could be
>abbreviated to
>
>   music:killed-by( :scarpia :tosca :stabbing )
>
>|   this also makes more sense semantically, since if you write it
>|   like subject-predicate-object, why should you care to define an
>|   association at all?
>|   (which may indeed be a question? may it?)
>
>I'm not completely certain I understand what you mean when you
>say "define an association" -- I assume you mean to declare an
>association type?
>
>Well, the reason is, quite simply, in order to avoid having to
>always specify the *role types*. The @assoc declaration tells us
>which role types to expect, and what order to expect them in, so
>we must have it (unless we are willing to pay the price of having
>to specify the role types on every association).
>
>Your comment does raise one issue, however, which is whether it
>is a good idea (or not) to encourage (or even allow) users to
>express associations *as if* they had a "subject".
>
>We all know that associations in Topic Maps are inherently
>multidirectional, and that "Tosca was composed by Puccini" is the
>same as "Puccini composed Tosca". That relationship no more
>"belongs to" Tosca than it does to Puccini.
>
>The XTM interchange syntax has always made this very explicit by
>having <association> elements appear at the same level as <topic>
>elements (while <baseName> and <occurrence> are *subelements* of
><topic>, because names and occurrences always "belong to" some
>topic).
>
>However, because we are humans, and we use natural language --
>a serialization syntax -- to communicate, it *is* natural to
>think in terms of a direction when *describing* a relationship.
>For most speakers of European languages, subject-verb-object is
>a very natural way to express a binary relationship. So why not
>exploit this in what is supposed to be a compact, intuitive and
>easy to read syntax? I believe we should.
>
>This does, however, raise the question of whether we should offer
>an alternate syntax, based on subject-object-verb word order, for
>the benefit of speakers of languages like Japanese and Korean:
>
>   :tosca
>      :puccini  music:composed-by .
>
>SOV-language speakers: Would this be useful or not?
>
>
>--
>Steve Pepper, Ontopian
>
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