A quick introduction to CXTM
I got some questions about how CXTM actually works, so I thought I'd put together a little introduction to it. If you want to create a CXTM file for one of your own topic maps you can actually do this in Omnigator with the export plug-in. ...
Read | 2006-08-04 22:27 | 0 comment(s)
An XTM conformance test suite
One thing that's really needed is a conformance test suite for XTM 2.0, which can be used by implementors to verify that they've actually gotten their implementations right. Of course, it could also be used by customers to verify that the implementation they are thinking of buying actually conforms to the standard. This is becoming more important as the hype around Topic Maps grows, and vendors start claiming they support Topic Maps without even knowing what it is. ...
Read | 2006-08-02 19:24 | 2 comment(s)
How to write a TM/XML deserializer
The TM/XML syntax is easy to understand for humans, and easy to process with XSLT, but seeing how to write a TM/XML deserializer is not trivial from the spec. However, once you know how to do it it's actually quite straightforward, so I thought I'd document the approach that I took here in case anyone else wants to have a go at this. ...
Read | 2006-08-02 16:56 | 2 comment(s)
TMRA'06 program published
The program for TMRA'06 has now been officially published. This year we have 32 talks, up from 24 last year, and I think this year's program is substantially stronger than last year's. It's interesting to note that quite a few of last year's open space entrants reappear this year as full-blown presentations. This year there is also a day of tutorials, so the conference is definitely grown compared to last year. ...
Read | 2006-07-28 14:54 | 0 comment(s)
The job is done
Yesterday we sent the completed draft of TMDM to ISO for publication as an International Standard. This means that the first part of the new Topic Maps standard is finally completed, finished, finalized, and ready. A few months from now (not sure how many), you'll be able to go the online ISO store and buy either a PDF version of the standard or a paper one. For those who don't want to, a free version is on isotopicmaps.org. So, implementors, go ye forth and implement! ...
Read | 2006-07-19 11:51 | 2 comment(s)
NULL in Topic Maps
One point on which Topic Maps differ from most other information representations is the handling of unknown or missing information. In relational databases these are represented using the special NULL value, and the same is the case in object-oriented programming. In XML there are different ways to approach this issue, one of which is the xsi:nil attribute. ...
Read | 2006-07-08 19:42 | 5 comment(s)
Topic Maps and topic maps
In all the Topic Maps-related documents I read these days people use "Topic Maps", "Topic Map", "topic maps", and "topic map" indiscriminately when referring to the Topic Maps technology. Sometimes people even mix it up within a single document. For a long time there was no official definition of what was appropriate, but the 2005-10-28 TMDM draft introduced a consistent terminology for this. So far it doesn't seem that many people have noticed this (admittedly subtle) change. So here goes. ...
Read | 2006-06-29 16:04 | 7 comment(s)
Citing ISO Standards
A strange thing I've noticed is that hardly anyone cites the ISO Topic Maps standards correctly in papers. I'm not sure why this is, but I thought I would do my bit to help people get this right. ...
Read | 2006-06-14 22:42 | 12 comment(s)
AToMS!
The last day of the week in Seoul was given over to AToMS, Asian Topic Maps Summit, a one-day conference devoted to Topic Maps. The conference was organized by the two Korean standards agencies (KATS and KSA), and attracted more than 200 attendees. I arrived a little late (in order to get some sleep), and by then it was hard to get a seat. ...
Read | 2006-06-05 19:43 | 1 comment(s)
ISO meeting in Seoul, day 4
The last day of the Seoul meeting also had the closing plenary in the morning, with lots of excitement around who would vote what regarding the OpenXML submission from ECMA and Microsoft. I missed all of this, however, in favour or more training in the TMRM from Robert Barta. He walked us through most of his mapping from TMQL to TMRM, and the details in the optimization of the resulting expressions. ...
Read | 2006-06-02 04:21 | 3 comment(s)