[publican-list] sortable lists, esp. glossaries

[Fred Dalrymple]

Hi Josh -- 

Are you familiar with Topic Maps? 

http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_Maps 
http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/ 

The original requirements for Topic Maps were specifically about dealing with indexes and glossaries -- mainly regarding issues across sets / families of documentation, such as those we had at the Open Software Foundation two decades ago (gulp). The standard became much broader by becoming more general, but the core capabilities include what is required by this project. 

RDF and Topic Maps don't have exactly the same internal model, but they are probably close enough (at least for this project) for Topic Map documents to be translated into RDF form. I'm fairly agnostic on syntax, but I understand how to express things much better in Topic Maps than in RDF, so that's my crutch. 

Fred 

----- Original Message -----

> On 01/31/2012 12:16 AM, Fred Dalrymple wrote:
> > Thanks for the pointer (I didn't look far enough back in the
> > archives).
> 

> > In general, if there is no automated programmatic solution, then
> > I'd
> > probably introduce an external file that would point at entries
> > that
> > didn't follow the programmatic default and provide either a clue or
> > explicit sorting key -- think RDF resources (though I'm partial to
> > Topic Maps). Perhaps verbose, but if a machine can't figure it out
> > automatically, what can you do?
> 

> > Actually, I'd assumed this in the solution because I'm thinking
> > about
> > non-alphabetic sorting needs, like the order of introduction of
> > terms, perhaps on a per-topic basis (and yes, enabling solutions in
> > forms other than print).
> 

> Fred, you've really piqued my interest now. What approaches might you
> take to order the introduction of terms using RDF?

> - Josh
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