[topicmapmail] Topic Maps as vocabularies

[Richard Light]

In message <7.0.1.0.2.20060707000838.028793b0 at simongrant.org>, Simon 
Grant <asimong at btinternet.com> writes

>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?

A few years back I implemented two thesauri and a classification system 
as Topic Maps as a learning exercise, without any major problems.  I 
used Kal Ahmed's PSIs to express the low-level thesaurus concepts:

http://www.techquila.com/psi/

One issue in doing this kind of work is that vocabularies are often set 
up as lists of terms without there being any definition of the concepts 
these terms represent.  The assumption is that "everyone knows" what the 
terms mean ...

So, in Topic Map terms (as it were), you have lots of names but no clear 
definition of the "subjects of discourse" which these names label.

However, this doesn't prevent you from producing a Topic Map which is no 
worse than the underlying termlist.

Richard
-- 
Richard Light
SGML/XML and Museum Information Consultancy
richard at light.demon.co.uk