Re: [Tm4j-developers] Re: Graph presentation

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

Comments below...
Cheers,
Jack

At 10:14 AM 2/27/2002 -0800, Sam Hunting wrote:
> > One wonders if the persistence layer of any knowledge product ought
> > not to  consist of something a bit more "universal" (whatever that
> > means) than XTM.  GXL comes to mind, and Murray Altheim seems to be
> > heading in that direction.
>
>Elaine Svenonius says that "objectives determine ontology" (and not the
>other way round). So I am not clear on what the objectives are here. I
>can see "universal" meaning "closer to the data struture" (more
>nodes-and-arcs-ish) or "closer to the knowledge interchanged" (more
>subject-and-association-ish).

Yup. When I said "whatever that means" I had in mind the idea that the 
persistence layer would simply store nodes and arcs and their attending 
attributes, and so forth, and that layer can be mapped out by 
mappers.  Originally, I was thinking that the class files (ala those 
involved in Ozone and (I presume) Xindice) would then be GXL classes, with 
mappers starting with that.  If I were to go with a RDBMS, as I presently 
do in Nexist, I can have class files that map directly from tables to 
whatever I want -- Nexist presently maps to XTM.

The reason for this thinking is that, presently, Nexist RDBMS schema makes 
pretty concrete the idea of topics, associations, and so forth.  Nexist 
anticipates layering XTM documents on top of DAML/OIL ontologies, so the 
persistence layer needs to model that as well.  It became clear to me, 
following Murray's comments, that a revised strategy aimed at generalizing 
the persistence layer to satisfy a broader range of use cases is in 
order.  All in all, I can see Nexist doing CG, DAML/OIL, and XTM, all in 
the same system.


> > It may be that the GooseWorks package is
> > going in that direction as well, but I'm not sure yet.
>
>We are focusing more on making the topic map paradigm "omnivorous with
>respect to markup." We want to eat everything... So far, we only
>excrete XTM, though that could change depending on what people's needs
>are, or what people volunteer to do.
>
> > Your thoughts on the notion of going in the direction of a universal,
> > graph-theoretic backside with wrapper/mappers?
>
>That is very close to the direction GW is headed in -- whatever
>"universal" might mean. (I don't think there is anything universal, at
>least that we can have knowledge of. There are only agreements and
>agreements to agree....)

To which, I agree!


>It's also very close to the ISO submission of the "road map."
>
>S.
>
>
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