[sc34wg3] PRE-ANNOUNCEMENT: something new coming soon

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Murray Altheim
|
| I don't know of Michel's STM DTD, but from his description it sounds
| as if he's simply using a subset of XTM. There'd be no harm in that,
| nor would it change the underlying model.

I'm not sure it's a good thing if people start thinking STM is a new
syntax for topic maps and we get worried people asking "should we use
STM or XTM?" and we create an impression of instability in the topic
map standards activity. Other than that I agree there's not much harm
in it.
 
| If STM is a *new* syntax, then what Michel needs is the RM in order
| to define his syntax.

Why not just use the SAM, for which there are now mappings for XTM,
HyTM, and CXTM?

Also, what on earth do we want with yet another syntax? Don't we have
too many already?

| If the RM has any use, it'd then be a rather simple matter of
| transforming STM to XTM, or STM to Hytime. 

Not really. Somebody would have to write the XTM/HyTM<->RM mappings,
which we already have for the SAM. So using the RM for this would be
much harder than to use the SAM. Not only that, but the SAM is much
closer to STM (I presume) than the RM is.

| In fact, it'd not be a bad idea to consider writing Linear Topic
| Maps as a legitimate expression of the RM rather than simply an
| authoring syntax.

Again, you mean the SAM, I think. LTM is *much* closer to the SAM than
to the RM. The next LTM spec will have a mapping to the SAM, but no RM
references. 
 
| Unless I'm misunderstanding something fundamental, which is
| certainly possible at this point...

I think you are: Michel and SRN[1] are creating a new XML DTD to make
a reformulation of the SAM in the RM. What I said was that it seemed
to me that STM was something completely different from the SAM, so I
couldn't see how this would help us in any way. It is of course
entirely possible that it will help; I'm waiting for a reply before I
judge that.

[1] Please note that no disrespect is meant by this. I can't say
    "Steve", because to me, "Steve" is the guy with the white beard.
    "Steve Newcomb" is a bit long, and in any case I quite like the
    hacker convention of using three-letter acronyms to refer to
    people. (RMS, ESR, GLS, GvR, ...) Let me know if it is annoying,
    though, and I'll stop.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >