Re: Topic Maps for Forrest ? (was RE: Proposal: alternative for book.xml)

[Kal Ahmed <ka...@techquila.com>]

At 14:42 23/03/2002 +0100, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
>Jeff Turner wrote:
>
> > I think it's implicit here that to achieve Forrest's goals, there'll
> > need a lot more semantic content than your average site. IMVHO that fact
> > should be made explicit, to the point of making "semantic markup" the
> > primary focus of Forrest, with the website being simply a frontend.
>
>I agree with the direction, but I also agree with the need to keep feet
>on the ground.
>
>Topic Maps are about metadata, that is data about data.
>
>My impression is: we have enough hard time getting the 'data', the
>metadata will come afterwords.

I can appreciate that point - I see from the list activity how hard people 
are working on the content and presentation - both important aspects of the 
site. However, I would like to just comment that I believe Topic Maps are a 
little more than meta data in the sense of being data about data. Because 
Topic Maps also define an intutive organisational structure (topics and 
associations), they can be used not just for asserting meta data about 
resources, but also for organising the resources in such a way that they 
can be more accessible to a new visitor to the site.

Also, it is possible to create topics or topic map views of other 
(non-document) data and integrate it with the topic map of the document 
data. Quite a powerful tool for integrating other forms of content into the 
site.

>So, no TopicMaps or RDF for now, we'll think about that later, if they
>make sense, that would be my choice.

I respect that position. I am a relative newcomer to the xml.apache.org 
project (though I have been using Apache XML libraries for a long time 
now), and I would love to be able to help out with any Topic Map / RDF 
related work you may consider in the future. So consider this as something 
of a pre-volunteering ;-)

Cheers,

Kal

Re: Topic Maps for Forrest ? (was RE: Proposal: alternative for book.xml)

[Nicola Ken Barozzi <ni...@apache.org>]

From: "Kal Ahmed" <ka...@techquila.com>

> At 14:42 23/03/2002 +0100, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
> >Jeff Turner wrote:
> >
> > > I think it's implicit here that to achieve Forrest's goals, there'll
> > > need a lot more semantic content than your average site. IMVHO that
fact
> > > should be made explicit, to the point of making "semantic markup" the
> > > primary focus of Forrest, with the website being simply a frontend.
> >
> >I agree with the direction, but I also agree with the need to keep feet
> >on the ground.
> >
> >Topic Maps are about metadata, that is data about data.
> >
> >My impression is: we have enough hard time getting the 'data', the
> >metadata will come afterwords.
>
> I can appreciate that point - I see from the list activity how hard people
> are working on the content and presentation - both important aspects of
the
> site. However, I would like to just comment that I believe Topic Maps are
a
> little more than meta data in the sense of being data about data. Because
> Topic Maps also define an intutive organisational structure (topics and
> associations), they can be used not just for asserting meta data about
> resources, but also for organising the resources in such a way that they
> can be more accessible to a new visitor to the site.

Data about data is still, well... , data.
So yes, metadata *is* data, but usually can be done afterwards.

> Also, it is possible to create topics or topic map views of other
> (non-document) data and integrate it with the topic map of the document
> data. Quite a powerful tool for integrating other forms of content into
the
> site.

cool

> >So, no TopicMaps or RDF for now, we'll think about that later, if they
> >make sense, that would be my choice.
>
> I respect that position. I am a relative newcomer to the xml.apache.org
> project (though I have been using Apache XML libraries for a long time
> now), and I would love to be able to help out with any Topic Map / RDF
> related work you may consider in the future. So consider this as something
> of a pre-volunteering ;-)

Good, pre-volunteering accepted :-)

Since I personally don't have *any* /concrete/ clue on how to implement this
in Forrest, I would be very happy to read a RT (random thought, as we call
explanations-proposals) from you on this topic.
I'm very interested especially in real-life use cases and possible
implementations.

--
Nicola Ken Barozzi                   nicolaken@apache.org
            - verba volant, scripta manent -
   (discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
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