Have you read: Hypermedia exploration with interactive dynamic maps by Mountaz Zizi and Michel Beaudouin-Lafon?
They define “interactive dynamic maps (IDMs),” which consist of:
topic maps, which provide visual abstractions of the semantic content of a web of documents and document maps, which provide visual abstractions of subsets of documents. (emphasis in original)
The authors speak of creating a thesaurus, user control over query expansion, using queries to create new maps, treating maps as documents, sharing maps among users, etc. Plus have screen shots of working software, SHADOCS.
The authors do not cite ISO 13250. The year? 1995 ISO/IEC 13250 became an ISO standard in 1999.
They don’t have roles and role players, etc., nor an explicit notion of subject identity, but where are we with regard to user control over query expansion for example? Or creating new maps with queries? (Was that possible with Robert Barta’s last draft for TMQL?)
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to re-invent it, maybe. (apologies to Santayana)
Creating new maps with queries was certainly possible with one of the TMQL drafts. It was one of the things the committee decided to drop in favour of a smaller language.
Comment by Lars Marius Garshol — April 25, 2010 @ 12:30 pm
I can only hope that the “smaller” query language will appear quickly.
Then work can start on a full query language with capabilities similar to those available 15 years ago.
Maybe we will get lucky and non-smaller topic map query languages will appear in the meantime.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — April 25, 2010 @ 3:19 pm