* Guy A. Lukes
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| But in my resent attempt (with Bryan Thompson) to implement a topic
| map in a relational database, I was shocked to discover that the
| underlying database structure was only a slight modifications of RDF
| triples.
|
| The Subject is the a-node
| The predicate is the r-node
| The object is the x-node
|
| All that was missing was a c-node to reify the triple
| and a set of PSIs to implement subject roles (predicates/r-nodes/roles) to
| support topicmap merging behavior.
|
| This gives you the simplicity of the semantics free RDF triples,
| with the power of topicmap subjects and merging (if you need it),
| plus the ability to leverage all work that is going on in the RDF
| community.
|
| Is there something I am missing, that is going to cause be problems
| down the road?
Well, what you describe here does not have any obvious resemblance to
topic maps as they are described in ISO 13250:2000 or ISO 13250:2003,
nor to anything that is currently scheduled to go into the next
edition of ISO 13250. In short, it's not clear that what you describe
here could be called topic maps. It certainly does not follow any
published standard by that name.
Also, what you describe sounds like the Topic Maps Reference Model,
and while I am no expert on the RM it does sound to me like you may
have omitted parts of it. We'd need to see the RDBMS schema to be
sure, of course, but that's my impression.
--
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50 <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >
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