[Sigia-l] Tools: Graphviz, docBook...

[Alexander Johannesen]

> Jan wrote:
> > i would love to hear more about the usage of those tools.
> > When do you use Graphviz and when do you utilise an UML Tool?
> > Does OmniGraffle support UML (sorry, I am on a PC)?

and

On 7/5/05, Conal Tuohy <Conal.Tuohy at vuw.ac.nz> wrote:
> I'd be interested to hear how Alex has been connecting those things together, too :-)

I'm an XSLT nutcase, so I built a framework (XSLT based) that supports
Topic Maps and docBook (and RSS/Atom, FOAF and possibly DOAP and a few
others :), so I've basically got XML templates that I fill out with
content, then I assign PI's to concepts and pages, and let one XML
file deal with the semantics between them. Referencing a page between
documents is usually like ;

   This sentance talks about the concept of { tm } and points to the {
about } page which is at level { about : $level }.

which translates into (example) ;

   This sentance talks about the concept of <a href="tm.html">Topic
Maps</a> and points to the <a href="about.html">about</a> page which
is at level <a href="about.html">3.2.0</a>.

The rest is just XSLT glueing all this together. The support for
GraphViz is just learning the Dot notation and map the semantics into
that. This framework is a bit haphazard right now, but it sits well in
a FOSS framework I'm releasing in a few months. Maybe I should
consider a IA setup as part of the default package as well.

If you don't have that much time and you've got some basic XSLT skills
(or patience :), xSiteable 0.9 creates GraphViz based graphs of pages
and sites (basically, Dot files) out of the box, albeit not the best
tool for site maps.


Alex
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"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
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