[Sigia-l] Quick TopicMaps/XTM question

[Simon Willison]

I'm trying to get to grips with TopicMaps at the moment and I've run in to 
a problem. I'm attempting to organise topics for web related technologies. 
CSS, HTML and XML are all Markup Languages (well, CSS is a presentation 
language but that's getting a bit too deep for my current level of 
understanding). Java, Python and C are all Programming Languages. I want to 
relate Markup Languages and Programming Languages, so I've created a topic 
called "Machine Languages".

Is there a way using XTM of declaring that Programming Languages is a 
/subset of/ Machine Languages ? instanceOf seems fine for announcing that 
Java is a Programming Language, but doesn't really make sense for saying 
that Programming Languages are a subset of Machine Languages.

I thought about defining subset-of as a new association, but it seems that 
it should be covered by the standard as it's a key element of a 
hierarchical ontology.

Disclaimer: I haven't made it through the whole standard yet (I'm going on 
tutorials) and this is my first experience of "real" metadata. Call me an 
enthusiastic amateur ;)

Regards,

Simon Willison
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/blog/