Has anyone considered using topic maps as vocabularies?
You may well know the issues - you've got some schema, perhaps, and
you want people to be able to use it with variant vocabularies for
types of element, perhaps. Or maybe you have an application that
refers to places, and you want to specify (externally) the list of
places that can be referred to.
Now there is the IMS VDEX - "vocabulary definition exchange" spec -
http://www.imsproject.org/vdex/index.html
and maybe there are similar ones, but the problem with vocabularies
defined in this way is both that they are limited in the range of
structures that they can represent, and liable to duplicate
structures that one would really rather have as topic maps.
If one wanted to use a topic map as a vocabulary, the simplest thing
to do would be to have all the topic as the elements of the
vocabulary, but it seems to me that wouldn't work, because of all the
ontology topics. Is there a simple, easily explained and implemented
way round this? Has anyone tried to implement anything along these lines?
Thanks
Simon
--
Simon Grant http://www.simongrant.org/home.html
Please continue to use my established e-mail address
a (just by itself) (at) simongrant.org
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