Posted by Edward Iglesias on Monday October 10, @10:02AM from the dept.

This is an email I recieved from Suellen Stringer-Hye interviewing "Alexander Johannesen, a Topic Maps programmer at the National Library of Australia". He has some intresting thoughts on the diffrence between Topic Maps and XTMs.

All,

I have heard from Alexander Johannesen, a Topic Maps programmer at 
the National Library of Australia. Here's  a little interview with 
him in which he explains what he says he is doing with Topic Maps. 
Also, For an excellent explanation of the difference between XTM 
and Topic Maps see:

 http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/7.html


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SSH: Is your current
work for the National Library of Australia on the library catalog?

The typical scenario is that I'm given a set of MARC records (100 
to about 3000, typically), and then I'll parse these through the framework and create a Topic Map from it, map in text and images, 
and voila!

Projects coming up that will be using the framework is our Annual Report, the FishTrout childrens folklore project, and our National Treasures website. Also in the pipeline is that it will run all our news, feeds and annotations to these as well, and possibly support 
our future blogging.

So I'm more working with subsets of our catalog (which is more than 
16 million MARC records). I'm also working on ways of doing the 
full catalog in Topic Maps, but that's a bit further down the line.

Also, there's a few pet projects; the Convex (a Topic Maps driven thesaurus/dictionary library), the Phontology tool (tool for 
scraping a file system, parse all sorts of bits with it, and create 
a Topic Map of it) and the Topic Maps Wiki 
http://www.shelter.nu/blog-070.htmlwhich still hasn't really 
taken off.

SSH:Is your website built on xtm?

It's built with xSiteable which is an XSLT framework that uses XTM 
as the Topic Maps engine, so, yes, in a sense. On the front page in 
the "feeds" section there is a RSS feed of the blogging, an XFML 
facetet representation of the same, but also a full XTM file for 
the whole website (the very one used for creating the site) that 
... umm, may or may not be valid. I haven't checked lately. :)


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Suellen Stringer-Hye
Vanderbilt University Website:http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/libtech/stringer/
Email: suellen.stringer-hye@Vanderbilt.Edu