Hello John McClure

thanks a lot for the explanations, unfortunately I have some open questions left.

You wrote: "Why is the topic map standard at http://www.topicmaps.org/standards/ [8] an unofficial topic map standard?" Links can be found to working technical committee reports, which are generally re-titled as "standards" once voted and accepted by ISO. These TC reports vary little from what is published by the ISO community as a "standard". So this is a standard by the ISO and thus I think it is at least SOME standard and so one probably shouldnt call it non-standard even if one is not happy with this standard, no?

"ISO/IEC 19788-1:2011 is information-technology-neutral" means that information elements defined by the standard for learning resources can be represented using a concrete implementation syntax such as provided by the RDF or by Topic Maps or by SMW syntax or by JSON or by a variety of others. For instance, a data element defined by 19788 might be "Learning Resource" which has an attribute called "Minimum Education Level". OK I think I understand now. You mean ISO/IEC 19788-1:2011 is probably a version of ISO/IEC 19788 since 2011 is probably the year 2011 and not a different (newer) kind of specification. Information-technology-neutral means that it is a specification that is neutral with regard to the specific infromation-technological implementation, but not neutral with regard to the aspect of information-technology per se. Where do you have this information from? You had just written that "To my knowledge ISO has not published, nor is intending to publish, instances of topic maps representing the content of their numerous publications, using either their (ISO's) standard for Topic Maps (ISO/IEC 13250), or any other ISO or non-ISO standard. Forgive me if I ever gave that impression." but using a concrete syntax which "can be represented using a concrete implementation syntax such as provided by the RDF or by Topic Maps or by SMW syntax or by JSON or by a variety of others." is ALMOST as good as directly publishing a machine readable standard! and as it seems by looking at this secret paper: N2448 - `summary of voting on ISOIEC NP 18343, Learning environment profile for automated contents. at http://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink/open/jtc1sc36 it seems that they may have now plans to concretely publish a standard. I was not talking about the rdf ontology like in the XML serialization <rdf:RDF but about the rdf graph data model this: <rdf:RDF xmlns:iso="http://iso.org/19788/" xmlns:dc="dublin core"> <iso:LearningResource rdf:about="LR12345">

dc:titleLithium</dc:title> iso:minEducLevel12th grade</iso:minEducLevel> </iso:LearningResource> </rdf:RDF> is already a serialized format which you would probably (I am not overly familiar with XML) phrase in the RDF graph model as

(Lithium(dc:title) ----minEducLevel(iso:minEducLevel)--> 12th grade(literal))-----Learningresource(iso:LearningResource) ---> LR12345 (rdf:about, literal) (Lithium(dc:title) ----minEducLevel(iso:minEducLevel)--> 12th grade(literal))-----rdfXMLsource(rdf:xmlns)---->(iso="http://iso.org/19788/")

(Lithium(dc:title) ----minEducLevel(iso:minEducLevel)--> 12th grade(literal))-----rdfXMLsource(rdf:xmlns)---->(dc=dublincore)

where I put the "URI" (which is here given by the link to the respective ontologies) or the term literal in brackets.

Do you agree? I may then look at your topic map formulation.