[sc34wg3] Simple Topic Maps (STM): An example of deserialization

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Michel Biezunski
| 
| We have published this document in its incomplete state to allow the
| members of the WG3 working group to see a working example of how the
| TMM brings extensibility and modularity to Topic Maps.  

Thank you very much for doing that. This does help to clarify what has
been meant by these terms on this mailing list over the past months.

| It is designed to show how differences between the needs of various
| users of the Topic Map standard can lead to both obvious and
| non-obvious differences with the SAM, as currently proposed in
| N0396.

As such it is anything but persuasive, since it is obvious that STM
can easily be represented using the SAM. Taken together this document
and that recently posted by Jan each specify different TMAs, which
means that there is still no interoperability between the two until
someone sits down to map the TMAs.

What this means, when spelled out is that with SAM we would map both
to SAM and be done, whereas you need to map XTM -> SAM, SAM ->
SAM-TMA, and STM -> STM-TMA, and then align the STM-TMA and the
SAM-TMA. You could obviously do XTM -> SAM-TMA directly, but that
would still leave you with one more step than we use.

As for the claimed benefits of STM compared to XTM I do agree that
some of them are real, but personally I would say that having only one
syntax is much more important than those benefits, simply for
marketing reasons.

| It is also designed to show that the code bases for STM users can
| have much in common with the code bases for SAM users.

Indeed. I estimate that it would only take a couple of hours to add
STM support to the Omnigator.

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