Re: topic IDs in XTM

[Eugene Eric Kim <eekim@eekim.com>]

On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Jack Park wrote:    (01)

> When I
> booted Nexist just now to look at the children of the topic identified by
> the string "What are whales?", I noticed that the decompiler for
> <association> is broken (or is it "not finished yet"?).  I'll have to fix
> it and send another post to show some code.  Thanks for catching that bug,
> Eugene.    (02)

I'll look forward to seeing this.  I need it to write a Nexist
import/export for perlIBIS.    (03)

> It's an interesting conundrum about how XTM associations are not
> directed.  They can take "apparent" directions when you assign <roleSpec>s
> to <member>s of <association>s.  Here, you can assign roles from any kind
> of taxonomic or other structure you wish.  In IBIS, for instance, were I
> not trying to keep the database as compact as possible, I would assign the
> role MainIssue to the original question of a new IBIS tree.  I would then
> assign other parent/child names to those tree members that follow.  But,
> for now, I view all that as implied and just ignore doing that work.  One
> of the hidden problems of XTM is that you can, if you go full monty with
> it, get awfully verbose.    (04)

What I find strange about this is, "apparent" directionality is useful for
humans, but it's not very useful for machines, unless they can understand
the "apparentness" as well.  Can machines figure out the implied direction
by interpreting the roleSpecs?    (05)

Would defining an IBIS ontology and assigning those class and slot names
to the topic map really be all that verbose?  Would it have a noticeable
effect on performance, especially as IBIS maps get very large?    (06)

> One changed planned is that IBIS <topic>s will have their
> <baseNameString> set to whatever your typed in response is, and Nexist will
> autoassign a TOPICID for the database, ending the tyranny of using topicID
> as a name.    (07)

Cool.  Compliance is a good thing.    (08)

> If Nexist were to import an IBIS topic map, say, one exported by somebody
> else, that export would have included the occurrence
> definitions.    (09)

If I included occurrences with fake URLs, would that be enough to make
Nexist think it's a topic map?  Or for that matter, if I used http URLs
rather than file URLs?    (010)

Incidentally, there seems to be a portability bug with Nexist.  I'm
running it on UNIX, and when I add some detail to a node, that detail is
not persistent.  Could it be that Nexist is trying to create a file in
some DOS-style path which does not exist on my system?  Or, are the file
URLs actually supposed to map to some row in HSQL?    (011)

-Eugene    (012)

-- 
+=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
|       "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they        |
+=====  can have an excuse to drink alcohol."  --Steve Martin  ===========+    (013)