Re: [Tm4j-developers] Drill-down topic maps

[Gerd M. <ge...@sm...>]

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001 16:54:03 +0100
"Kal Ahmed" <ka...@te...> wrote:

> I think that the solution to this problem lies in something that Gerd and I
> discussed briefly a little while ago and that is creating a more generic way
> to create and access TopicMap objects. We already have the TopicMapFactory
> interface, which at least provides a generic means of creating topic map
> objects regardless of the back-end. However, I think that what we also need
> is a TopicMapManager interface which would enable a back-end to provide a
> generic interface for accessing and creating TopicMap objects.
> 
> I am thinking of an interface something like this:
> 
> import com.techquila.topicmap.*;
> import java.util.*;
> 
> public interface TopicMapManager {
> 
>   public TopicMapManger();
>   public void initialise(Properties) throws TopicMapManagerException();
>   public TopicMap getTopicMap(String sourceURL);
>   public Collection getTopicMaps();
> 
> }
> 
> The init() function takes a java property set, which would enable any
> back-end specific initialisation to be passed en-masse (and so manage things
> like establishing a database connection and setting up internal caches).
> Perhaps an additional function to set properties one-by-one might also be
> useful.
> 
> The getTopicMap() function returns a topic map whose sourceURL property
> matches that specified in the parameter.
> The getTopicMaps() function returns all of the TopicMap objects that the
> manager knows about.
> 
> Jack, you should then be able to get the referenced topic map by checking
> with the TopicMapManager (equates to the XTMSession object I guess).
> Although your topic map will still need to use the full URL for referencing
> the topic map as an occurrence (or else your code needs to have some smarts
> to recognise how to process the occurrence according to its type).
> 
> How does this sound ?

Sounds good so far. This brings another idea to my mind: What about
distributed topic maps ? E.g. an association in topicmap A could have 
a type that is defined in a topicmap B somewhere. It would be cool
to manage this transparently for the application, e.g. be topic
proxies or something like that.

Best Regards,
Gerd

--
________________________________________________________________
Gerd Mueller                                    ge...@sm...     
SMB GmbH                                  http://www.smb-tec.com