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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@i... Web: www.infoloom.com ==========================================
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