Interoperable Logging WAS: Re: [topicmapmail] Questions About XTMOccurrence Semantics

[Dmitry]

> Thinking about this some more, maybe I should be asking whether there is anything in the way of an interoperable best practices 
> approach to 'attaching' logging, provenance and auditing information to the construction, editing and merging of TMs?

I would recommend to use Item Identifiers for this purpose. According TMDM Item Identificator is a "locator assigned to an 
information item in order to allow it to be referred to".

So we can assign to each topic, name, occurrence, association Item Identifiers in a specific Topic Map. Merging preserves Item 
Identifiers. So in some sense Item Identifiers keep track of the origin of the specifc topic map item.

We can have an additional topic map (provenanace topic map) in which topics correspond to Items from "domain level" topic maps.
These topics use "domain level" Item Idintifiers to refence back to constructs from "domain level" topic maps.

If you design a topic map engine, I would recommend to incorporate provenance information inside of your data model (kind of TMDM 
extension at implementation level). In this case, at any time, you can export extensions as a "provenance topic map"  in XTM

Dmitry