[sc34wg3] CTM: Realistic use cases or toy examples?

[Robert Barta]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 10:14:08AM +0100, Steve Pepper wrote:
> * Lars Heuer

> |     <http://www.semagia.com/tmp/ctm-comparison.html>

> This description of what I regard as a "typical" CTM document is
> based on my experience using LTM to hand-author a very large
> number of topic maps.

Ok, maybe my experience with

   rho at mando:~$ find knowledge/current/ -iname '*.atm' | wc -l
   171
   rho at mando:~$ find knowledge/current/ -iname '*.atm' | xargs wc -l |grep total
     69823 total

may fade in comparison, but ...

> This explains why the curly braces and the semi-colons feel
> unnecessary in examples ##1-13. If there's only a single
> statement or identifier, it really seems like overkill to
> enclose it in curlies and require that it be terminated with a
> semi-colon.

... true, there are always these "boundary topics" (linking to any
existing background ontology), which are very short, only carry a
name, maybe a subject identifier.

But then, for these the {} is quite some syntactic sugar
(noise). Some people like sugar. But then also...

> However, the semi-colon is not intended as a terminator; its
> purpose is to separate multiple statements clearly from each
> other. And the curlies are there to demarcate a block that
> consisting of several statements.

... there are the 'heavy' topics which really carry a lot of
information, such as

   http://md.devc.at/users/rho/internet/semantic-web/semantic-web

For these, an empty line (or a dot somewhere) works amazingly well
to visually separate them.

I also like to keep each information item ('characteristic') on its
own line, just to allow me easier to spot/delete/move things around
with having to grab the mouse and make a lot of marking mistakes.

This means that an additional ';' at the end is a completely empty
exercise. But some people like empty exercises.

> Neither of these may be *necessary* from the point of view of
> parsers (and those who speak on their behalf). However, CTM is
> for people, not parsers.

It is for authors, yes.

\rho