[topicmapmail] Topic Maps as vocabularies

[Murray Altheim]

Quoting Simon Grant <asimong at btinternet.com>:

> 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.
[...]
> 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?

There are probably dozens of existing "abstract schemas" in this domain,
so it seems a shame to reinvent the wheel here. Considering Topic Maps
as simply a carrier for a schema means it's a simple matter of creating
a PSI set to express the elements of the chosen schema. I've done this
before with Conceptual Graphs and various other related expressions,
and as you note Kal's also provided such a set for thesauri. The only
real decisions (to my mind) that need to be made are:

   1. choice of schema based on project requirements
   2. whether to represent only concepts or also include
      relations between concepts

The rest are implementation details.

As for the problem you cite in your last paragraph, that seems to be
a matter of either typing or scoping: one just needs to differentiate
"utility topics" from the ones considered as belonging to the
vocabulary being described; there are a variety of ways in XTM to
accomplish that.

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray06 at altheim.com>                              ===  = =
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     = =  ===
SGML Grease Monkey, Banjo Player, Wantanabe Zen Monk               = =  = =

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