* Simon St Laurent
| 
| I'm just not sure that there's much real benefit to using XLink.  

I think there can be, if you use it in the right way. The presence of
well-defined XLinks in your documents can be used to extract useful
information that may then be used in topic maps/RDF, but maintained as
part of the document rather than externally because that simplifies
maintenance. (Single place of update.)

For example, relationships like part X contains Y, module Z depends on
W, tool Q uses P, and so on can be reliably extracted from XLinks once
an application knows how to interpret the endpoints of the links.

XLink is very similar to the links of HyTime, and topic are basically
HyTime with very strong conventions for what the allowed endpoints for
links are. (Well, there's some additional stuff, but ignore that.) The
two (XLink and topic maps) have different uses, however. Since XLinks
have no contraints on the use of the endpoints you can embed them in
documents, but you then lose the precision of structure which topic
maps give you, but at the cost of no longer allowing document
embedding.

However, configure your XLink harvester correctly and you get to both
have the cake and eat it. (Hmmm. Sounds like there is a paper in this.)

Admittedly, you could do this without XLink (I have, many times), but
XLink makes it easier, and could perhaps even make it easier to
constrain, validate, and edit your links (at least if there were good
XLink tools around, which perhaps there may be one day, once people
figure out how to use it).

| On the one hand, sure it provides a generic means of indicating
| connections.  On the other, applications that do things like slap an
| xml:lang on the link element to indicate which language it's in are
| providing guidance about the nature of the link that goes beyond the
| role/arcrole info that XLink provides, and which could perhaps even
| contradict the best guess of a 'pure' XLink system.

This only apply if you use the unstructured parts of XLink, such as
the title attribute, which I don't think is a good idea. If you want
unstructured links, just create your own elements.
 
-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net > 
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no > 


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