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

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Conal Tuohy
>
> I believe the standard practice for this kind of thing is to use  
> scope.
> It's quite simple to use scoping topics to attach metadata to an
> occurrence. In my work, I am frequently harvesting topic maps from a
> variety of sources, and merging them. I create a topic to represent a
> source topic map, and all occurrences harvested from that source are
> automatically scoped with that particular harvest topic. The harvest
> topic then has any necessary metadata attached. See the  
> documentation on
> the XTM mergeMap element:
> http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/index.html#elt-mergeMap

* Peter P. Jones
>
> That looks like an XTM 1.0 process.
>
> I have a worry that the process you describe doesn't seem to match  
> up with the forthcoming version of mergeMap
> http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-xtm/#d0e1268
> (2006-06-19 version)

What Conal referred to is a feature of XTM 1.0 that does not exist in  
XTM 2.0, that is correct. Still, any XTM 1.0 implementation will have  
this, and you can certainly apply that process whether you use XTM  
2.0 or not. In many of the cases where people want to track  
provenance they won't be using XTM at all, but they can still use  
scope in this way to track the provenance.

So while only XTM 1.0 explicitly provides this feature you can always  
use it, even with XTM 2.0, if you either do a little extra work or  
have a TM implementation that supports this.

In general I agree with Dmitry, though.

--Lars M.