John McClure wrote:

"Of course, thanks for the pointer. Yes, I'd agree that 19788's ontology be 
closely reviewed for inclusion. 19788:2 standardizes the  Dublin Core 
properties, the same I recommend for [[wikidata]] provenance data, the same 
slated for the [[wikidata]] ontology. But more to your point is that the entire 
ISO corpus would fit really well if it were viewed as a topic map whose topics 
and sub-topics can be referenced from  [[wikidata]] artifacts such as property 
definitions."

Hello John

Frankly speaking I don't see why one would want to use topic maps.
That is RDF triples are after an identification (canonical: elements with the 
same URI are identified)
 a labeled graph, here to be called "the" RDF graph. (I know that some people 
call the triples themselves
"the" RDF graph, but why use a second word (namely graph) for triples?
Triples are very trivial highly disconnected graph.).
If I want to connect certain nodes of that graph to a topic
I only need to supply these nodes with an extra triple which says 
("this node belongs to this topic", i.e. something like (node, 
belongsto,thistopic) ) or modify
the canonical identification map and the RDF graph will be a "topic map" or one 
has the case that the triples are 
already set out in "topics" that is for example 
if I have a set of triples with the same resource URI then upon canonical 
identification these are
a kind of "topic map" (with all "legs" pointing in one direction) or am I 
missing out something crucial? 

However if you start with topics, you have no canonical information about the 
"internal structure" of
a topic and in some cases you would need to artificially impose this in 
retrospect onto
the datastructure.
Like if your topic is "members of a society" , you have all the members and you 
would need some internal structure like a hierarchy
 then you would need to supply each member with a hierarchy classification 
(i.e. with extra data, which is usually different for each member). For the RDF 
case the person who gave you
the triples could have made a choice of order which could be given upon 
canonical identification.  I.e.  in principle the
internal structure depends on your identification map but there is a canonical 
one.
You can of course mimick a RDF triple with a topic map by choosing the topic to 
be the ressource and 
one "leg" of your topic as a property and the topic which is connected with 
this "leg" as the object, but the 
choice of a leg is not canonical if there is more than one leg. Only if you 
would make all "legs" of a topic map into triples you would have something like 
a canonical assignment. I find these differences important. But may be I have 
overseen something or misunderstood 
about topic maps (I read about this issue what I found scattered around in the 
internet so this is not so unprobable). 



I had this kind of discussion with people from deepa mehta 
http://www.deepamehta.de/
because they used topic maps, but sofar nobody there could convince me about 
the distinguished advantages of topic maps.
But the discussion was sofar rather brief.
The discussion was because we discussed to what extend it would be possible to 
merge a student project we 
had at HTW Berlin ( a collaboration platform for visualizing RDF data called 
Mimirix
http://www.daytar.de/art/MIMIRIX/) with deepa mehta, like for example
one could use at least the backend, which has already a layout for access 
control 
(the deepa mehta people told me that they haven't yet really attacked the issue
of access control) or one could use at lease the carefully designed client.


May be you have other arguments for topic maps, as said I might have missed out 
something.


I understand that there are other issues like the speed of adressability or 
direct access issues
but these are then rather an issue of the serialization I find.

So I didn't understand why for example the pregiven JSON structure of an 
JSONarray 
http://www.json.org/javadoc/org/json/JSONArray.html
is not used in JSON-LD 
http://json-ld.org/spec/latest/json-ld-syntax/#sets-and-lists
but thats another topic.

In the context of applications of ISO metadata you may want to read:
http://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/Examples+of+semantic+web+applications+and+environment
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