Re: OPML+RDF/XTM?

[Danny Ayers]

> Hi Thomas,
>
> >OPML, with its authoring tool, is really good for whipping up lists, but
it
> >doesn't help you with the two things that make authoring topic maps (or
rdf
> >graphs) by hand hard:
> >
> >1) Handling many-to-many relationships, and
> >2) Keeping track of what you have already defined, linking them together
> >properly, and avoiding duplication.
>
> hmm - I was thinking of an app slightly more aware than Radio's outliner,
> which would certainly help on 2) (RDF query/db tools can do this, so why
not
> have one underneath the outliner?).
> 1) I reckon is trickier though. Perhaps you could suggest a case or two
> which would likely be problematic?
>

A good test case is managing browser bookmarks.  Every tool I have seen
basically constructs a tree, and some of them are very good helping you do
that.  What I really want to do, though, is to put a bookmark into multiple
categories and to add comments and other annotation.  For example, take OPML
itself as a concept.  Presumably is represented by a class or category, I
might like to include the OPML home page under XML languages, List Builders,
Information Organization, Dave Winer's Tools, and who knows where else?

There is no way that OPML is going to let me represent this without
extensions, and without duplicating the bookmark and its url many places.
If you are going both to build your own interface and to extend the design
of OPML, the value of using it seems small.

To the extent that your set of triples are simple property lists, such that
you can write them in hierarchical lists, OPML could be helpful.  But I find
that's not what I usually want to do.

Cheers,

Tom P

Received on Monday, 1 April 2002 00:23:56 UTC