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RE: Two link questions

• To: "'Eckenberger Axel'" <Extern.Eckenberger@k...>, "'Gustaf Liljegren'" <gustaf.liljegren@b...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Two link questions
• From: "DuCharme, Bob (LNG-CHO)" <bob.ducharme@l...>
• Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 10:45:00 -0400

> 2. I'd like to know more about link-bases, but it seem so 
> elusive and XLink doesn't say much about it. Is there a good 
> place to start?

It's my opinion that the XLink concept of linkbases never got too far
because of the progress and evangelism around RDF and Topic Maps. These both
offer ways to collect links and to then look at patterns in those links
(e.g. if A links to B and B links to C and D links to C, the A is connected
to C, and B and D have something in common, and...). 

For that matter, there's far more progress with link collection projects
that just use relational databases without even bothering with XML, from the
auction comparison sites that were popular a few years ago to the current
weblog link accumulation sites. I know that auctionwatchers.com used Sybase.
I'm not sure what http://onfocus.com/bookwatch uses, but check out
http://onfocus.com/bookwatch/mentions.asp?b=3, which demonstrates
out-of-line many-to-one linking by displaying a collection of links from
multiple web log entries to a single Amazon entry. I assume that this is
driven by an RDBMS with no use of XLink, RDF, or any other specialized
XML-based technologies. 

So if you're looking for interesting applications with collections of links,
look beyond XLink, and even beyond XML. 

Bob DuCharme          www.snee.com/bob           <bob@  
snee.com>  "The elements be kind to thee, and make thy
spirits all of comfort!" Anthony and Cleopatra, III ii

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