xml-dev - RE: Didier's lab report

[Didier PH Martin <martind@netfolder.com>]

Hi Simon

Simon St.Laurent said:

> I wonder if maybe there'd be a way to establish this a little more
> solidly as a means of providing metadata about links and inclusions.
> XLink already provides some metadata, but I suspect we're going to
> find more places where extra information about a link might be useful,
> and where they might be useful across multiple applications.

Simon North said:
Isn't this precisely where topic maps come in?

Didier replies:
Yes and no. topic maps are collection of links. These links also come with
meta data or facets or something like the RDF properties. A topic is a
collection of resources and could therefore be an xlink extended object.
However, topic maps are not well equipped to handle conditional inclusions
or inclusion/transformations. They just define topics and their related
collection. Thus the implicit model encoded by topic maps is:

topic
  |1
  |
  |n
resource

Topic maps uses links to encode such model. So, you can say that a topic map
is also a linkbase. Conclusion, it does not help very much with dynamic
inclusions based on the user interactivity or inclusions to be performed
before any user interactivity.

cheers
Didier PH Martin
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