External Occurrence Storage

Hello Topic Mappers

Since the Afghanistan War Diary topic map discussion I have been 
thinking of occurrences and their role in Topic Maps based information 
management. As we all know an occurrence is an instance of the subject, 
or, as Patrick observes in his blog [1], just a property of the topic. 
Now, the occurrence has a content type that can be an URL, text or a 
number, for example. The important point here is that the occurrence can 
be either *inside* or *outside* the topic map.

My question is, whether or not, there has been any floating ideas or 
discussion anywhere about an idea of consciously "exporting" and 
"importing" occurrences to/from an external occurrence storage. Lets say 
I have a topic map with a large number of textual occurrences. Wouldn't 
it be quite a natural "operation" to export all my occurrences to an 
external occurrence storage and replace the textual occurrences in the 
topic map with URL occurrences. As an effect, the size of my topic map 
reduces and occurrences can be edited independently of the topic map. 
Later on, when I need my textual occurrences back, I could do an 
"import" operation and the topic map application would fetch all URL 
occurrence resources and replace URLs with original (or modified) texts. 
Now you might say, ahaa, sounds like a pastebin [2] kind of service. And 
yes, you're quite right.

Has anyone ever experimented with occurrence import/export? Would you 
find such an feature useful??

Kind Regards,
Aki / Wandora Team

[1] http://tm.durusau.net/?p=2902
[2] http://pastebin.com/