[Tm4j-developers] Drill-down topic maps

[Jack P. <jac...@th...>]

New member alert! <gg>

Goal:
To allow an occurrence of a topic to be, in fact, another topic map.

Problem:
xlink:href opens a can of worms.  For instance, the topic map FiveKingdoms 
has a topic Animalia, the occurrence for which is another topic map called 
Animalia.

An approach to a solution:
I am making the occurrence an instanceOf topicMap.  In so doing, I have my 
XTM engine do a type check.  My system -- http://nexist.sourceforge.net -- 
uses HSQLDB as a relational store.  Everything is in tables.  It becomes a 
simple task for the engine to see that an occurrence is of type topicMap, 
and search the topicmap table rather than the topic table.

Angst:
This is just not a general enough solution.  Besides, Nexist converses 
(client-server) with my xtm engine by way of an XTMSession object.  It will 
be an easy change to rewrite XTMSession to converse with TM4J 
instead.  Thusly, I'd like to know how this community might go about 
implementing drill-down topic maps.

Cheers
Jack