RE: Linkbases, Topic Maps,and RDF Knowledge Bases -- help meunderstand, please

[Michel Biezunski <mb@infoloom.com>]

It helped me understand the relation between topic maps and rdf to
compare it with the notion of atom as seen in physics and
in chemistry. For a chemist, an atom is an elementary building block
for matter, for a physicist, an atom is a complex set of elementary
particles that can interact between each other.

It's not because there are two ways to regard an atom that either physics
or chemistry should be suppressed. They probably shouldn't be merged either.
But rather
they could be made work together.

RDF and Topic maps address basically the same problem, but the layer of
represention is different. Topic maps are better for "high level"
description (chemistry),
RDF is closer to what a computer actually does in terms of connecting
granules of information
(physics). I think what needs to be done is to articulate these two levels
in the clearest possible
way, and then take the features of topic maps and rdf and assign them to
where they belong,
while resolving the overlap. It's not an obvious task, but I think it's
worth trying.

I see Xlink as supplying the basic syntax for expressing links. While the
ISO Topic maps
standard was based on the HyTime equivalent of extended links, XTM is only
based on
simple xlinks which are instantiated in three forms:

- topicRef : points to a syntactical topic
- subjectIndicatorRef: points to a resource, which is indicating the subject
of a topic (although the topic doesn't necessarily exist as a syntactical
construct).
- resourceRef: points to a resource which itself constitutes the subject of
a topic (although the topic doesn't necessarily exist as a syntactical
construct).


Michel
==========================================
Michel Biezunski, InfoLoom
Tel +33 1 44 59 84 29 Cell +33 6 03 99 25 29
Email: mb@infoloom.com  Web: www.infoloom.com
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