Rogier Peters wrote: <snip/>
> Googleing xml and relations quickly brought me another subject that I > haven't seen discussed much here - XML topic maps. On of the big > advantages of topic maps over my simple mapping is the amount of > semantics that topic maps allow. Topic maps allow one thing to be > related to another, and also describe what the one thing is, what the > other thing is, and what kind of relation they have. > So the next step would be to implement a topic map > transformer. There is > a apache-license topic map project at > http://sourceforge.net/projects/tm4j. I'm definitely going to > look into > it myself, but need to do some reading first, and I would like to > discuss it. By the way, if you don't like topic maps, I would like to > know too - I wasn't able to find any criticism on the matter > (googleing > 'why topic maps are bad' or 'topic maps suck' didn't help) I've done some experimental work with Topic Maps in Cocoon - using XSLT to harvest TMs from other data sources, merge them, and then to render them as web pages with "related links". See for example http://www.nzetc.org:8080/tm/corpora.html for a TM-based view of some of our website that shows some of these relations but virtually no actual content (warning: it's very slow). I think the technology holds a lot of promise, and could be particulaly useful in things like Forrest, but we will need some extra components before they will be readily used in Cocoon, particularly a TopicMapMergeTransformer, and some kind of TM-oriented templating transformer for rendering. I haven't had a chance yet to deal with it, but it's on my list of things to do :-) By the way, did you realise that the tm4j project actually already includes some Cocoon components? Cheers Con
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