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jbritt | 1 Feb 2003 06:54
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Re: Can we attack the 'not enough libraries' thing straight on?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: NAKAMURA, Hiroshi [mailto:nahi <at> keynauts.com]
> Sent: Monday, January 27, 2003 12:14 AM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Re: Can we attack the 'not enough libraries' thing straight on?
> # Back to the style issue, we have a plan to introduce
> # wiki-like feature to RAA.  That's for linking projects
> # and for adding comments of users.

I've been working on a topic map wiki at www.ruby-doc.org/wiki/topicwiki.rb

It differs from the standard wiki in that it allows more specific annotations of links.
For example, a wiki page about Rimport could contain links to wiki pages about Rexml and Rdoc, with the
linking markup indicating
that these are dependencies.  Other wiki page links might be annotated to indicate a reference to online
documentation, or a
reference to where book information may be found.

In a conventional wiki, one would know that there was a link from one page to another, or a link to an external
site, but would not
know what that link meant without some active interpretation of the English text.  The use of TM notation
makes the wiki content
more accessible to machine parsing, with greater semantic information.

The use of TM notation means the wiki pages can be used to generate an XTM (XML Topic Map) feed:
www.ruby-doc.org/wiki/wtm/RDP.xtm

The XTM could be used to create a browsable index of ruby apps, libs, docs, dependencies, and so on.

As an aside, topic maps have been applied to CPAN
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Gavin Sinclair | 4 Feb 2003 16:40
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Topic maps: what's coming up?

James,

What topic-map-related features do you have in mind for ruby-doc.org?
How complete do you consider it to be now, and what kind of things
have you implemented so far?

Cheers,
Gavin
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jbritt | 5 Feb 2003 04:58
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Re: Topic maps: what's coming up?

> James,
>
> What topic-map-related features do you have in mind for ruby-doc.org?
> How complete do you consider it to be now, and what kind of things
> have you implemented so far?

My first thought was that it would focus on establishing associations among apps/libs/modules and
documentation (books, articles,
web sites).  It might also help define dependencies among code, though  don't know it that's starting to mix
apples and oranges.  I
suppose a complete ontology of the Ruby world would be nice, but likely too much for a topic map wiki.

The content is quite incomplete.  I've been spending time going back and forth between adding content, and
adjust the nature of the
relationships.

I'm starting to think that there needs to be a small, strict set of allowable association types (e.g.,
DependsOn, ArticleTopic,
BookAuthor) to both help people adding content and to prevent fragmentation because associations that
are essentially of the same
type are called 50 different things.

Topic maps does offer a way to coral things back in, to indicate that several things with different names are
really the same thing,
but maintaining that is too much work.

What's been implemented is:
Every wiki page becomes a <topic> in the XTM.  The parser knows about certain special markup for defining
associations and typed
occurrences.
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