Thanks Fred, I've heard of Topic Maps, but haven't used them or looked
into them in depth.
Both Topic Maps and RDF are of interest to me, because we're doing a lot
of work on topic-based authoring using publican.
Take a look at this: http://vimeo.com/35732986
At the moment we use a normalized RDMS to hold metadata, including
relationships.
That works ok as long as there is a single instance of the CMS. Once
there are more than one, to maintain compatibility and portability of
information between them we need a(n) (extensible) canonical metadata
schema.
Presently, I'm leaning towards RDF as the best fit, but I'm not sure.
I'll look into the Topic Maps, and I'm interested in any thoughts you
might have on it.
- Josh
On 02/01/2012 01:03 AM, Fred Dalrymple wrote:
Hi Josh --
Are you familiar with Topic Maps?
http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_Maps
http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/
The original requirements for Topic Maps were specifically about
dealing with indexes and glossaries -- mainly regarding issues across
sets / families of documentation, such as those we had at the Open
Software Foundation two decades ago (gulp). The standard became much
broader by becoming more general, but the core capabilities include
what is required by this project.
RDF and Topic Maps don't have exactly the same internal model, but
they are probably close enough (at least for this project) for Topic
Map documents to be translated into RDF form. I'm fairly agnostic on
syntax, but I understand how to express things much better in Topic
Maps than in RDF, so that's my crutch.
Fred
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 01/31/2012 12:16 AM, Fred Dalrymple wrote:
Thanks for the pointer (I didn't look far enough back in the
archives).
In general, if there is no automated programmatic solution,
then I'd probably introduce an external file that would point
at entries that didn't follow the programmatic default and
provide either a clue or explicit sorting key -- think RDF
resources (though I'm partial to Topic Maps). Perhaps
verbose, but if a machine can't figure it out automatically,
what can you do?
Actually, I'd assumed this in the solution because I'm
thinking about non-alphabetic sorting needs, like the order of
introduction of terms, perhaps on a per-topic basis (and yes,
enabling solutions in forms other than print).
Fred, you've really piqued my interest now. What approaches might
you take to order the introduction of terms using RDF?
- Josh
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