Re: [xml-dev] Re: Topic Maps - current state of the art?

[Steve Newcomb <srn@coolheads.com>]

I must admit that many say, as you are now saying, that they have found
the TAO article very helpful to them.  I guess the lesson is: We never
know in advance what the effects of our actions will be.  The one thing
we can be fairly sure about is that, as John Lennon famously put it,
"Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans."   (:^)

From my perspective, the "TAO" article by Steve Pepper permanently
confounded topic mapping, in the public's mind, with a single model,
which was later codified as the so-called Topic Maps Data Model (TMDM).
 It changed the meaning of "Topic Maps" from what I expected it to mean
into something that is fundamentally opposed to the agenda I was working
on when I coined the term, and both long before and long since then, too.

I wish I had a nickel for each of the times I've been asked, "Isn't
there an RDF vocabulary for Topic Maps?", as if topic mapping could be
boiled down to a specific syntax.  From the very beginning of Topic Maps
in 1991, that was exactly what I hoped Topic Maps would NOT be.  The
larger vision that I was pursuing was also the primary goal of the
precursor ISO 10744 HyTime standard, which I also co-drafted and
co-edited, and of HyTime's precursor, the now-long-neglected drafts of
ISO 10743 Standard Music Description Language.  I was a founding
co-editor of that one, too, starting in 1986.  (It has been a long and
weirdly eventful journey.)

Honest, capable, and respectable persons can have very serious
differences.  Here I'll paraphrase something Graham Moore once said to
me, "You can't make a useful industrial standard your way!  An
industrial standard has to boil down to something much smaller and more
concrete."  In vital respects, he was deeply correct, and I've always
been grateful for his candor.  But if it's true, then the *reasons why*
it's true are not good reasons, because those reasons oppose the
increase of human understanding, global prosperity, and the public
interest.



On 10/21/2013 07:26 AM, Stephen Cameron wrote:
> So, I have bought the book (found it in Australia cheaper than postage
> from the US) and am looking forward to a good read on an interesting
> subject.
> But having browsed the subject today, this article below seems to be the
> best introduction I came across, the analogies to familiar things (like
> book indexes) being very helpful to my understanding.
> 
> 
>   The TAO of Topic Maps
>   <http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html>