[Sigia-l] Cocoon & IA

[Jonathan Broad]

Scott,

I worked for a few months this year on a plan to build a web publishing 
system based on Cocoon and TM4J (topic maps) that I thought was quite nice. 
 It was a little bleeding edge to get political buy-in, but we went far 
enough to get a good view of that approach's advantages.

I believe that Topic Maps will someday become the "source code" for IA's 
doing interface work.  They encapsulate the relationship layer of an 
information system well, isolating it from the data layer (unlike 
relational databases).  The XML pipeline model is simple and powerful, and 
fits well into a 'single source' content management strategy.  I look at 
content management processes primarily as *constraints* from the POV of the 
IA of a site or information system.  Making such processes more efficient, 
and their content more structured and 'clean' greatly expands the scope of 
implementable IAs built with that content.