{"id":1669,"date":"2013-07-08T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-07T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wwwneu.strehle.de\/tim\/weblog\/archives\/2013\/07\/08\/1621\/"},"modified":"2013-07-08T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-07-07T22:00:00","slug":"1621","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/weblog\/archives\/2013\/07\/08\/1621\/","title":{"rendered":"If we were to redesign Topic Maps\u2026 (LinkedIn discussion)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Steve Pepper started a (lengthy) discussion in the LinkedIn <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/groups?gid=109285&amp;trk=hb_side_g\">Topic Maps Community<\/a> group \u2013 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/groupItem?view=&amp;gid=109285&amp;type=member&amp;item=250338692&amp;qid=b70954b6-85d8-446d-a18e-d9f99d088ce9&amp;trk=group_most_popular-0-b-ttl&amp;goback=.gmp_109285.gde_109285_member_250338692.gmp_109285\">If we were to redesign Topic Maps based on what we have learnt in the last decade, what would we do differently?<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Since LinkedIn groups are closed, I\u2019m posting my comment here as well, in response to proposals to replace occurrences (properties) with associations:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn my opinion, the strength of topic maps is that they\u2019re quite intuitive and easy to explain.<\/p>\n<p>When I\u2019m modeling data, I\u2019m thinking of topics (or subjects\/objects\/things) with names, classes, identifiers and arbitrary, repeatable properties (often literal values). And then about relations between topics, with relation types and roles. SQL database design made some of this rather hard, so I was very happy when I discovered topic maps back in the day.<\/p>\n<p>Reducing that model to \u201ceverything is an association\u201d seems counter-intuitive to me. This reminds me of the RDF \u201ceverything is a triple\u201d approach that is dumbing down data structures so much that it makes them harder to understand; <a href=\"\/tim\/weblog\/archives\/2013\/02\/08\/1555\">see my blog<\/a>. \u201cEverything is a row in a database table\u201d is on the same, not really helpful level. And as a programmer, I don\u2019t look forward to such a change; simple property look-ups are faster and easier to implement when they don\u2019t need to go through the whole association complexity.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019d like datatype support in topic maps (literals that are annotated with a datatype of \u201cdatetime\u201d, \u201cnonNegativeInteger\u201d etc.). And maybe associations could extend topics, i.e. inherit all topic functionality without optional reification?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Steve Pepper started a (lengthy) discussion in the LinkedIn Topic Maps Community group \u2013 If we were to redesign Topic Maps based on what we have learnt in the last decade, what would we do differently? Since LinkedIn groups are closed, I\u2019m posting my comment here as well, in response to proposals to replace occurrences [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weblog"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1669\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}