V. BLISS [Sigia-l] Quick TopicMaps/XTM question

[Kal Ahmed]

On Wednesday 24 July 2002 17:07, Richard Hill wrote:
> [Re-posted for "Vivian Bliss" <vbliss at microsoft.com>  because of HTML
> problems.  Dick Hill]
>
> Simon,
>
> XTM 1.0 and TopicMaps (the original 13250 ISO standard) provide the very
> general class/subclass that Cesar references and <variant>, which could
> cover some equivalence class relations.  XTM and TM intentionally
> sidestep any further typing of relations.  I believe that is left up to
> interested individuals to extend XTM those directions with Published
> Subject Indicators.
>

There are two OASIS technical committees which might be of interest here. The 
first is the TM Published Subjects TC [1] which is working on how such common 
subjects can be published for the purposes of reuse by a wider community. The 
secon is the TM Vocabulary for XML Standards TC [2] which seeks to creates 
Published Subjects for subjects relating to XML and which (suprise suprise) 
includes topics for the hierarchical categorisation of those subjects.

Both TCs are still at relatively early stages of their work (the Vocab. TC is 
now waiting on the Published Subjects TC to get further in its work). 
However, one of the nice things about topic maps is that it is very easy to 
define an equivalence. If I create a subject indicator for a hierarchical 
categorisation association like 
"http://www.techquila.com/psi/subcategory-supercategory" and later OASIS 
define "http://www.oasis-open.org/..../broadercat-narrowercat" and I 
determine that the two are semantically equivalent, I can declare this 
equivalence simply by creating a single topic with both subject indicators.

So the upshot is that you can start now creating topic maps and your migration 
path to "standardised" topics is a relatively painless one.

Cheers,

Kal

[1] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tm-pubsubj/
[2] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xmlvoc/

-- 
Kal Ahmed, techquila.com
XML and Topic Map Consultancy

e: kal at techquila.com
p: +44 7968 529531
w: www.techquila.com