Re: Status of the Dublin Core to Topic Maps mapping?

Hi Andrew,

[...]
> Just wondering why this is such a big deal in practice.  Can't you
> just create a topic representing the author automatically as part of
> the processing phase and then add reification information at a later
> stage (if and when it actually becomes required)?

Yes, I could do that. In the Atom 1.0 -> XTM 2.1 mapping I do exactly
that (if no atom:email or atom:uri is provided). That's the reason for
the "Patrick Durusau"-problem. ;) Patrick shows up several times in
the TM-Planet -> XTM 2.1 topic map with different identities (item
identifiers).

RTM [1] is a different story: It provides currently no mechanism to
create topics from strings / RDF literals. We could fix RTM and
mandate that a topic with an item identifier is created if a string
should play a role in an association (currently it's an error). The
string / literal could be mapped to an occurrence or name of the
automatically generated topic.

WD 29111 [2] is also silent about the algorithm how to map strings /
literals to topics. And as long we don't have an algorithm, it seems
to be safer to map strings / literals to occurrences rather than to
associations, even if this mapping is less elegant and you could argue
that this mapping would be semantically wrong, since the creator of a
blog entry shouldn't be an occurrence of the blog entry.

Maybe RTM and WD 29111 should provide an algorithm to map strings /
literals to topics.

[1] <http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/rdf2tm.html>
[2] <http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc34old/repository/0884.htm>

Best regards,
Lars
-- 
Semagia 
<http://www.semagia.com>

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