Re: Mapping files?

* Thomas B. Passin
| 
| Topic Maps are actually fairly complicated, if you try to include
| everything.  For example, a scope can point to a topic in the map, a
| web page, or a subject indicator.  

This is one of the reasons I think a good XTM tutorial is needed. A
scope is *always* a set of topics. The three different elements are
all resolved to topics.

  <URL: http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-xtm/#sect-proc-scope >

| At every turn, there are many, many things you have to check for.
| You cannot just relate topics, you have to put in a role for each,
| and perhaps a member to hold the role (depending on how you design
| the implementation).  And so on...

I wouldn't say it is complicated, but the model is not small either,
admittedly. I don't think subsets are the solution to that, but I
think good technical tutorials and good tools are. TM4J and Perl::XTM
*are* good tools, but before you understand the model and the syntax
they are not much help.
 
| For example, if you use a topic map to provide navigation among your
| web pages, you only want a handful of topic, association,
| occurrence, and role types.  Maybe you can avoid scopes altogether,
| depending on how you model the site.  Maybe you do not need all the
| optional kinds of references (only use topicRefs for occurrence
| types, say).

If you have a good tool you don't need to worry about any of this. You
use the parts of the tool you want, and just leave the rest alone.

| What you need is a UI that creates all the behind-the-scenes
| topicmap-specific things, and that UI will be much easier to create
| and use if there are few options.  It should be able to output XTM
| for interchange purposes.

Exactly. The references and all that are *not* in the model, they are
in XTM only.

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