[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Re: Topic Maps - current state of the art?
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>
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