Topic Map: Plays of Shakespeare

Author: W. Eliot Kimber, ISOGEN International Corp. eliot@isogen.com.

This package contains a simple topic map that demonstrates the following aspects of the topic map standard:

• Defining the "identity" of topics
• Using topics as "themes"
• Using topics to define types
• Using topics to describe subjects
• Using topic associations to relate topics together
• Creating a topic map that uses topics from separate topic map documents
• Using Xlink syntax to make a topic map active, in addition to using the normal HyTime syntax built into the Topic Map architecture.
• Having topics that refer to occurrences of the topic. (NOTE: I've included the text of the relevant plays in a stripped-down form, although I didn't have time to make connections to all of them.)

This demo can be used with any tool that supports the browsing of SGML documents and that supports Xlink and/or HyTime (although the HyTime stuff has not been thoroughly tested at this date). I originally developed it for use with the HyBrick tool from from Fujitsu (http://collie.fujitsu.com/hybrick/). The package includes a couple of DSSSL style sheets, one for the topic map documents themselves and a default style sheet you can use for any other document. There are a few bugs in the 0.8 version of HyBrick. For example, you don't seem to be available to return after following a cross-document link. I've reported all these bugs to Fujitsu and they are working on them.

You can view the documents with Panorama, but I haven't developed good style sheets because Panorama's linking support doesn't fit very well with the topic map design (it makes every IDREF an active link whether you want it to or not). It also doesn't support Xlink at the moment (as far as I know).

I developed the files as SGML documents and haven't bothered to convert them to XML, but that should be trivial using a tool like S2X from James Clark. The main reason for using SGML was that it was easier to do the architectural validation that way. But the use of SGML or XML shouldn't affect either the Xlink processing or the HyTime processing.

The topic map document "playsmap1.sgm" is intended to be self describing. You should be able to simply open it with HyBrick (or any similar SGML browser) and you're on your way. I don't know of any XML-only Xlink-aware browsers at the moment, so I haven't tried it with any, but when and if there are some, it should work with them once the files are translated to XML. If you do make XML versions of the files, let me know and I'll add them the distribution.

The materials are:

• Whole package: playsmap.zip or playsmap.tar.gz.
• Topic map hub document: playsmap1.sgm
• Second topic map document (contains "Hamlet" topic): hamletmap.sgm
• Document containing a mention of West Side Story: wssjourney.sgm
• Topic map document DTD: topicmapdoc.dtd. Used by the two topic map documents.
• "MyDoc" DTD: mydoc.dtd. Used by the wwwjourney.sgm document.
• Topic Map architectural DTD: topicmap.mdt. NOTE: this is not an official version.
• SGML declaration that adds colons to name characters: usecolon.dcl
• DSSSL spec for topic map documents: playsmap.dsl
• Default DSSSL spec: tagview.dsl
• DSSSL architectural DTD for the DSSSL specs: dsssl.dtd
• SGML Open Entity Catalog: catalog

If you have any questions or comments about this sample, please don't hesitate to send me email at the address shown above. I'll try to keep this sample up to date as the standard is finalized.