[Sigia-l] CMS and IA

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| I agree completely. I wrote up my thoughts on this in skeleton form at
|   <URL: http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/itms.html >

* Peter VanDijck
| 
| Great paper. One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to deal with
| the limitations of dealing with URI's. Let's say a CMS stores a
| title, author, text and creation data in separate database fields.
| And it displays these things in varying ways on a website.

I see what you mean. What you want to do in this case is to somehow
create a URI that addresses the specific RDBMS row that stores the
content object. One way to do it might be to create URIs of the form
"x-cms:23478374" where the number is the ID of the row and then to
have the CMS code interpret that URI. Some of our customers have used
this approach and been happy with it.

Another choice might be to ditch the RDBMS entirely and just make the
content object a topic and connect the title, author, text, and
creation date to it with names, occurrences, and associations. That
gives you a cleaner architecture, but might not be possible in all
cases, for example if the customer wants to use an existing CMS to
work with the content and a TM solution only for managing it.

| How do you build a topicmap that classifies stuff that is in a
| database to drive your existing website? Do you define a line
| between what metadata the CMS handles and what the topicmap handles?

The answer is that either you put it all in the TM--that is, you base
the entire CMS on a TM--or you do have to draw a line. The difficulty
with drawing a line is that you'll then have some info in the TM and
some in the RDBMS. You can solve this by mirroring the parts stored in
the RDBMS in the TM part in various ways, but you shouldn't do this
unless necessary.

All of section 3.2 is really about when this might be necessary, and
how to solve it if it is.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >