Rogier Peters wrote:The chap leading a project (probably that one) on topic maps was active on the Forrest-dev list recently.
<snip/>
Googleing xml and relations quickly brought me another subject that I
haven't seen discussed much here - XML topic maps. On of the big
advantages of topic maps over my simple mapping is the amount of
semantics that topic maps allow. Topic maps allow one thing to be
related to another, and also describe what the one thing is, what the
other thing is, and what kind of relation they have. So the next step would be to implement a topic map transformer. There is
a apache-license topic map project at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tm4j. I'm definitely going to look into
it myself, but need to do some reading first, and I would like to
discuss it. By the way, if you don't like topic maps, I would like to
know too - I wasn't able to find any criticism on the matter (googleing
'why topic maps are bad' or 'topic maps suck' didn't help)
I've done some experimental work with Topic Maps in Cocoon - using XSLT to harvest TMs from other data sources, merge them, and then to render them as web pages with "related links". See for example http://www.nzetc.org:8080/tm/corpora.html for a TM-based view of some of our website that shows some of these relations but virtually no actual content (warning: it's very slow).
I think the technology holds a lot of promise, and could be particulaly useful in things like Forrest, but we will need some extra components before they will be readily used in Cocoon, particularly a TopicMapMergeTransformer, and some kind of TM-oriented templating transformer for rendering. I haven't had a chance yet to deal with it, but it's on my list of things to do :-)
By the way, did you realise that the tm4j project actually already includes some Cocoon components?
Cheers
Con
Regards, Upayavira
