[topicmapmail] Lacking Topic maps m2m functionality

[Inge Henriksen]

I feel that there are some missing pieces in the topic maps standards and wanted to hear your opinions. Topic maps need, in my opinion, more machine to machine (m2m) functionality, more specifically:


1.       Topic maps discoverability; indexing engines (ie. Google, Yahoo, etc) out "there" have no way of finding new topic maps, well no standardized way. One could put a link to a topic map xtm file, but I believe there should be some kind of standard to find topic maps

2.       Subscriptions to topic maps; there is no standardized way of subscribing to the changes in a topic map, I feel that one can't really expect users to import entire topic maps as XTM files each time they want to update their local copy of it. To solve this problem in the "Grep" project we made an RSS stream with immutable proprietary entities for the Grep subscribers

Here is a sketch of what I had in mind so far:


-Make a low level service, like DNS, (so no high-level JSON or XML web service, people can add this kind of services higher up in the stack later), return simple structures for record data

-Use same trust system as DNS, top level is root, then all the IANA official Uri's, then each level is split on the "."'s, ie. .com, example, www, just like DNS here too -Service is called a Uri Discovery Service, and is technology independent, ie. TMs, RDF, etc.

-Each record contain; Uri, last changed date, description(optional), ontology the Uri belongs to, ++ more

-Root delegates queries just like DNSs

-Cache just like DNSs

-Written in open source os portable C++ so everyone can join in and add their own service

-Allow search for Uri's, and for all Uri's belonging to an ontology

-Allow ordering by last change date, this allows for subscriptions to ontologies/maps, note that the Uri last change should be updated when the subject/topic it represent is updated



Kind regards,
Inge.

Inge Eivind Henriksen | Konsulent
Bouvet ASA Sandakerveien 24C D11 Postboks 4430 Nydalen N-0403 Oslo
Tlf. +47 23 40 60 00  |  Faks: +47 23 40 60 01  |  Mob: +47 480 96 400
http://www.bouvet.no<http://www.bouvet.no/>  | inge.henriksen at bouvet.no<mailto:inge.henriksen at bouvet.no>

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