[topicmapmail] Stupid newbie question: specification of association roles

[Andrew S. Townley]

Lars,

Thanks for the info.  I noticed a reference to TMCL last night after I
wrote the email and when I got to the Ontopia paper about RDF and Topic
Maps in my stack of stuff I printed.  I haven't gotten a chance to
finish it yet, though.

I'll take a look at it in more detail later.

Thanks for the pointers.  I *think* it's slowly starting to make sense,
and it seems like a good way to approach what I'm trying to do.  Still
need to iron out a few things in my understanding of both topic maps and
what I'm trying to do.  I also think it's more in line with the type of
hypermedia application I have in mind than RDF, but this is something
else that I have to work out as well.

I'm sure I'll have more questions before too long... :)

Cheers,

ast

On Sat, 2006-12-30 at 10:25, Lars Heuer wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
> 
> Welcome to Topic Maps :)
> 
> [...]
> > What I'm wondering is if there is, or if not, why there isn't a way to
> > specify the required roles of an association.  If you define the
> 
> Well, the Topic Maps community develops currently a standard for such
> purposes. With [TMCL] you can define constraints.
> There are a few, non-standard, solutions: [OSL], [Toma] and [AsTMa!],
> but they are proprietary island solutions, which means, that you
> cannot use your Toma constraints in AsTMa! etc.
> 
> > association with different roles?  It looks like this is more-or-less
> > the intention of the association skeleton in AsTMa, beyond just allowing
> 
> The main purpose of the AsTMa= templates is to let the user type less,
> but you're right, this solution is also useful to define a minimal
> constraint "Don't forget to define this and that role".
> 
> [TMCL] <http://www.isotopicmaps.org/tmcl/>
> [OSL]  <http://www.ontopia.net/omnigator/docs/schema/tutorial.html>
> [Toma] <http://www.spaceapplications.com/toma/Toma.html>
> [AsTMa!]
> <http://astma.it.bond.edu.au/astma!-tutorial.dbk?style=printable>
> <http://astma.it.bond.edu.au/astma!-spec.dbk?style=printable>
> 
> 
> Best regards,
> Lars
-- 
Andrew S. Townley <ast at atownley.org>
http://atownley.org