[topicmapmail] Topic Maps as vocabularies

[Simon Grant]

Has anyone considered using topic maps as vocabularies?

You may well know the issues - you've got some schema, perhaps, and 
you want people to be able to use it with variant vocabularies for 
types of element, perhaps. Or maybe you have an application that 
refers to places, and you want to specify (externally) the list of 
places that can be referred to.

Now there is the IMS VDEX - "vocabulary definition exchange" spec -
  http://www.imsproject.org/vdex/index.html
and maybe there are similar ones, but the problem with vocabularies 
defined in this way is both that they are limited in the range of 
structures that they can represent, and liable to duplicate 
structures that one would really rather have as topic maps.

If one wanted to use a topic map as a vocabulary, the simplest thing 
to do would be to have all the topic as the elements of the 
vocabulary, but it seems to me that wouldn't work, because of all the 
ontology topics. Is there a simple, easily explained and implemented 
way round this? Has anyone tried to implement anything along these lines?

Thanks

Simon

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