[sc34wg3] Topic Map View

[Steve Pepper]

Lutz, Patrick,

*Lutz:

| Dear Patrick,
| 
| thanks for your interesting answer, but my confusion lasts.

Excuse me for butting in, but I have the impression that you
are talking past each other in this discussion of "topic map
views".

Patrick, I believe, is using "view" in the sense of an *abstract*
view. When he talks about a "topic map view", he is essentially
talking about how non-topic map data can be viewed as though it
were a topic map.

As an example, think of the classic ER-model used in Database
101 courses, where you have entities such as "department",
"student", "course" and "section", and relations such as
"majors in", "offers", "enrolls for". Data conforming to such
a model could be represented in a relational database. The
contents of that database, however, could also be "viewed" as
a topic map, with entities corresponding to topic types,
relations corresponding to association types, rows in the
"student" table corresponding to instances of the topic type
"student", etc.

Lutz, on the other hand, is talking about how data represented
in a topic map may be "viewed" in a more literal, visual sense,
through some transformation to a presentation (e.g. in HTML).

Since these two views (sic) on what constitutes a view have
little or nothing to do with one another, you seem to be
talking at cross purposes.

Hope this helps.

Steve

--
Steve Pepper <pepper@ontopia.net>
Chief Strategy Officer, Ontopia
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3
Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps 1.0)