Re: External Occurrence Storage

Aki,

The conception of an "occurrence" has always had a pointer like notion
to it. That is pointing to something external to the topic map.

That was more evident when Topic Maps were based on HyTime because
HyTime had much more robust addressing mechanisms than URLs.

If I point to the URL of a news story as an occurrence of some topic,
you are going to have to hunt through the text of the story for whatever
I was pointing to as an occurrence. 

I point this out because for a story like the Afghanistan War Diary, the
discussions of it or of the Cablegate material, is likely to be spread
over hundreds of newspapers in dozens of languages. 

You would never be able to store all of that material as "local"
occurrences and so would always be pointing to it as "remote"
occurrences of various types. 

You know, supporting more robust linking into remote resources, a la
XLink/XPointer or even HyTime, would be very cool. Probably too much to
wish for but cool. 

Hope you are looking forward to a great weekend!

Patrick


On Fri, 2010-12-03 at 12:08 +0200, Aki Kivela wrote:
> 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/
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