Re: Mapping files?

Unfortunately it would appear that Mr. Udell has attempted to hijack the
phrase "topic map" as what he describes there might be a topic map, but
its "not a topic map as we know it, Jim".

What Mr. Udell describes is, as far as I can see, just simple
categorisation - he creates a category (calling it a topic) and then
attaches one or more resource addresses to each category. You can do the
same thing in topic maps by creating topics and adding occurrences to
them. You can do much more with topic maps besides this - you can create
relationships between topics...any kind of relationship you can think of
in fact; and you can use types and scope to make the information you put
into your topic map as valuable as the resources that it points to.

Topic maps in the form that we understand them are described in a number
of papers. Check out my on-line topic map [1], or Murray Woodmans
excellent portal[2] for links to papers, articles and other resources. 

While you are surfing, you can download the XTM file that my from [3] to
see what a *real* topic map file looks like ;-)

Cheers,

Kal

[1] http://www.techquila.com/topicmaps/tmworld/
[2] http://www.topicmap.com/
[3] http://www.techquila.com/tmsamples/xtm/tmworld.xtm

On Thu, 2003-02-20 at 17:56, joshua wrote:
> I just finished reading Jon Udell's article, "Quick and Dirty Topic Mapping" 
> ( 
> http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/webservices/2002/01/01/topic_map.html?page=last#thread
>  ).I'm a newbie and am wondering if someone out there can provide a more 
> detailed explanation of the "mapping file." Or, if there's a good site I can 
> reference. Is this XML related?
> Thanks,
> Joshua
> 
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