[topicmapmail] Announcement: Wandora topic map application public

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Aki Kivelä
>
> You may not have heard of Wandora before as we have not
> been great noisemakers but I am proud to announce the first
> version of our knowledge extraction, management and publishing
> environment based on topic maps, Wandora is now public
> for free download and non-commercial usage at
>
> http://www.wandora.net/

That's great news! Welcome to the Topic Maps community. :-)

> Wandora's topic map model is little limited compared to the  
> standard [...]

I see from your wiki that the definition of Topic Maps you have used  
is a mix of XTM 1.0 and TMDM. That is, at least one of your  
"differences" with the standard is only a difference with XTM 1.0. On  
the other hand, you use the term "subject locator", which was  
introduced in TMDM. So I'm not sure how to interpret this.

Anyway, to clarify:

> [http://www.wandora.net/wandora/wiki/index.php? 
> title=Reduced_Topic_Maps]
>
> 1. Subject identifiers and subject locators are never resolved.  
> This means that they are simply used as identifiers and it has no  
> effect at all whether or not the URI refers to an actual local or  
> online document.

This behaviour is 100% consistent with the new standard. (Actually,  
it's consistent with XTM 1.0, too.)

> 9. Associations can only have one player per member and cannot have  
> two members with same role.

This is actually two points. The first is not a difference with TMDM,  
where "member" is called "association role", and only has a single  
player. So you are 100% conformant on that point.

On the other point you are not conformant (as you say), and I think  
this is unfortunate, because it means you can't express symmetrical  
relations, like so:

   borders-with(norway : neighbour, finland : neighbour)

Instead, you have use something clunky like

   borders-with(norway : neighbour1, finland : neighbour2)

but then the association is no longer symmetrical (unlike the  
relation), and so you have to also add

   borders-with(norway : neighbour2, finland : neighbour1)

which isn't pretty.

You did say this was a work in progress, and that's fine. I just  
wanted to point out one area where you may want to progress some  
steps further... :)

> but has some very interesting features such as layered topic maps  
> and RDF
> import. Wandora also supports SQL database storage of topic maps.

I'll download it and have a look at this when I have time. Which is  
not right now. :-)

--Lars M.