Refining occurrences

Occurrence is a resource attached to a topic. Topic Maps standards defines occurrence as the instance of subject, the topic represents. However, usually occurrence is thought more generally a property of the topic. Occurrence resource can be almost anything. Usually occurrence resource is an URL addressing networked resource or a literal, a resource itself. In the URL resource, the resource data is stored outside a topic map while the literal resource is in the topic map. Wandora supports only literal resources although Wandora may handle the literal as an URL. A literal resource is essentially a text.

Because an occurrence is a text fragment, it is probable it contains information that somehow relates to the topic carrying the occurrence. On the other hand topics are connected with each other. These connections, associations in Topic Maps vocabulary, represent also information related to topics. Saying this out, it becomes quite natural to ask a question how one could distill associations out of occurrence resources. And more over, could one pack association information to occurrences. This page discusses the first option of transforming occurrences to associations (and topics, of course).

First we'll look at refining options of occurrence editor. After that, this page shows general occurrence transformation options of Wandora. Finally, we'll investigate Wandora's batch extractors used to refine occurrences.