[Sigia-l] Distributed thesaurus?

[PeterV]

>  This may sound like an obscure technical point, but the 
>  effect is that with XFML you can't have a reliable 
>  distributed thesaurus, since you have no rules for when your 
>  term A is the same as my term B.[...]

Indeed, that's a fundamental difference. Let me just throw in that XFML
is a lot less ambitious than Topicmaps - it's a whole different
ballgame. 

However, XFML *does* allow for distributed metadata (not distributed
"thesaurus", but distributed faceted metadata hierarchies), it just
wants you to make connections between topics *manually*, instead of
doing it automatically (using psi's) like topicmaps. It's a different
philosophy, really. There are rules that indicate which topics are the
same, it is unambigiously indicated within each <topic> element.

I agree with Lars (a clever man if I've ever seen one) that topicmaps
can be easily used for distributed thesauri. The problem is that someone
still has to define limits or agreements for the topicmap: how do we
represent certain thesauri concepts in our topicmap? That is the format
you (I think) are waiting for. So you need a subset of topicmaps for
your purposes, a spec in which you agree how to represent distributed
thesauri in the topicmap format.
PeterV