Subject: Re: [TS] New poll for thoughtstream
From: Jack Park (jackpark@verticalnet.com)
Date: Tue Aug 01 2000 - 16:49:38 EDT
Comments below...
From: Ben Darnell <ben@thoughtstream.org>
> Volunteering to do work is always well recieved. I'm not a fan of Java,
> and there's not a good VM for Linux (or if there is, Netscape doesn't
> use it), but I'm not going to try to talk anyone out of contributing.
> It looks like your work complements mine, because I'm not planning to
> work on a graph editor or an enhanced text editor for the Python
> ThoughtStream (not at first anyway; graphing at least will probably be
> added eventually). I can give you a module in the thoughtstream cvs
> repository if you'd like.
>
> > http://lynx.eaze.net/~pdkb/web/jack_gui.jpg
> > is a screen shot of an open source project I built for building topic
maps.
> > I used GraphMaker for the graphics editor, and Jext for the text editor.
In
> > fact, the XML displayed in the text editor was constructed by the copy
> > command at the graph editor.
>
> You mean the graph is fully editable? Cool. How much can be done
> without delving into the text editor?
>
Yup. You can create graphs, then save them as xml files or copy into Jext
for further editing. I'm planning to add more nodes (rectangles, etc) to it
eventually. Right now, the whole project is a kluge built from two existing
but rather different open source projects. Jext is by far one of the most
sophisticated java text editors I have seen. It draws heavily from JEdit,
but goes much further, putting all the gui specifications in xml files (e.g.
menus, toolbars, etc) so that you can tweek the gui to suit. GraphMaker
does the same thing, but without xml files. I hope someday that a project
will be launched that simply uses both tools as plug in modules, all using
the same xml ini files that Jext does.
Is it time for me to jump into the TS project? Not sure yet. I'm working
with a group formed at Bootstrap.org (Douglas Engelbart) to think through
and build a complete knowledge management system. Much of TS is likely a
component of such a system. I would hope that something we do will benefit
TS as well.
IBM's JDK1.3 for Java appears to be pretty solid. Personally, wrt Netscape,
I'd consider that a pretty useless browser. I hope to put my money on
Mozilla. But, my project is not an applet -- doesn't need a browser to
function.
> >
> > Jext is really nifty because it lets you put templates into a menu. It
came
> > with Java, HTML, and a bunch of other templates. I took them out and
put
> > DocBook, and a draft of the XTM topic maps tags in. You can copy and
paste
> > between the two editors. I would think this project, if given some
synch
> > code for palms would be quite useful, once some XML dialect is invented
to
> > handle TS structures.
>
> Such an XML dialect already exists, at
> http://thoughtstream.org/thoughtstream.dtd
> although it's due for some changes (updates to match
> http://thoughtstream.org/design.php3 )
>
Great! I'll look at it. It's rather simple to convert the XMLFormat file in
GraphMaker to conform to a different dtd.
> Is there an official XML format for topic maps, or are you just working
> with one of the proposals? I think that TS will end up using a subset
> of topic maps (or perhaps the whole thing), with a few extensions.
>
> -Ben
There *will be* an official XML format. It's called XTM. I am on the
working group that is authoring it. The notion of extending XTM is already
part of the discussion. The desire is to get a working XML version of the
ISO Topic Maps standard (SGML), then provide for extensions that provide for
more of the detail one gets from a full semantic network (e.g. Conceptual
Graphs). At present, I am using one of the hacked prototypes of XTM.
Jack
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