topicmap.com

The Simile timeline widget has been incorporated into the site so that it is now possible to see a timeline of 10 years of topic maps history. I’ve included all news, resources, tools and organisations. It can a bit crowded, especially around conference times but for the most part it works pretty well. Some of the dates are a bit dodgy – in many cases I just had to guess a year and set it to Jan 1. If you have any changes please let me know.

Thanks to the Simile project, and Tim Isenheim for coding WP SIMILE Timeline.

I have configured the WP2TM WordPress plugin to include subject identifiers for each of the tags which have an entry in Wikipedia. This should help with any efforts to link the data in the xtm feed. There still are a lot of gaps though! I might go back and fill in the vendows and other popular tags another day.

Johannes Schmidt has just updated QuaaxTM core which now implements PHPTMAPI 2.0. The SVN is now available including a test suite.

I’ve been working away at bringing the site up to speed for the last few days. I reckon that I’m almost done now and so to throw a little celebration I thought that I’d make a Wordle of the tags on topicmap.com. Read the rest of this entry »

The Ontopia Knowledge Suite (OKS), including the Ontopia Topic Map Engine, was open sourced by Bouvet in April 2009. It was made available by SVN on 16 June 2009. It probably can be considered the pre-eminent open source topic maps engine.

Bouvet has established Google group and support fora:

• Google project,
• mailing list,
• blog.

A legal structure is currently being finalised.

Lars Marius Garshol has announced the availability of the Ontopia source code!

We have now started loading the Ontopia source code into Subversion over at the Ontopia Google Code project. So far, what we have is the Java source code for the product plus the tests. We also have a guide to building the code.

I have just installed the Wordpress Topic Maps plugin for WordPress and it appears to be pumping out an XTM feed quite nicely. Cool! All I need to do now is configure some PSIs for the tags (oh joy) and tidy up the display of the link a bit. The map will improve over time as I slice and dice my way through some of the static content remaining on the site.

Thank you Trond K. Pettersen.

I have finally bitten the bullet and have moved away from the predominantly static site which I have been maintaining since 2000. I decided to use WordPress as a platform due to the vast number of themes and plugins available to it as well as the ease of maintenance and hosting. I have also moved the Blogger blog into WordPress as well. Now, that didn’t take long did it?

During the process I have added a whole bunch of news items from the last year or so! I am also in the process of slicing up a lot of the monolithic pages (books, resources, tools, vendors) into single posts with the appropriate category. Categories can then be used as the predominant organising principle. Tags will be applied to all posts too. So, it’s not a TM system by any means but certainly a lot better than what I had.

Hopefully you will find the site more functional and a little easier to navigate.

As part of the open sourcing of the OKS, Ontopia have set up a mailing list.

The Ontopia mailing list is the preferred forum for any discussion of the Ontopia product and the open source project. So whether you want to discuss licensing issues, how to run the project, or how to use the software, please post to the forum.

Ontopia now have a blog dedicated to the open sourcing of their software.

This is the blog of the Ontopia project, where we will be posting news relevant to the project. Exactly how we will use the blog is not yet clear, but expect to see news of new releases and other significant developments posted here.

NetworkedPlanet have released, Subj3ct, a new web service for resolving subject identity.

Subj3ct is a Subject Identity Resolution Service, it provides both a portal for humans to use and an API for developers and applications. We store subject identifiers, equivalent identifiers and also links to web resources that contain structured or unstructured information about a subject.

Robert Cerny has announced that JSON Topic Maps 1.0 is now final.

JTM is a Topic Maps notation that is particular useful in a  JavaScript environment (e.g. Browser). It is meant for machine  exchange of topic maps, not for authoring.  It is based on the TMDM  and stands next to XTM 2.0 on the shelf of notations.

The TMRA 2009 website is now up and running.

TMRA 2009 will be the fifth event in the annual series of international conferences on Topic Maps Research and Applications. TMRA is the advanced scientific and industrial forum whose main object is connecting the key players in the Topic Maps community. Here you will find researchers and users in government and industry, as well as the vendors, the luminaries, and the standards creators gathered for an exchange of ideas in a stimulating setting.

Bouvet has announced that the will be open sourcing Ontopia’s OKS. This is great news for the Topic Maps world as it will allow a lot more developers get their hands on the OKS, probably the most mature and featured Topic Maps engine currently available.

Bouvet is a consulting company focusing on the Nordic market, and so selling a software product internationally has proved to be difficult to accommodate within the organization. Bouvet wants to continue to develop the OKS and to sell services based on the product. In our opinion the best way to do that, and to ensure that existing customers are satisfied, is to turn the OKS into an open source project, which we will call Ontopia.

There are still many decisions left to be made, and while we do have ideas for how to administer and license the software, we wish to invite other interested parties to give us their input, to help ensure that the Ontopia project is interesting for as many parties as possible. For this reason we will host a planning meeting on May 26th in Oslo. The intention is that this will enable an active community to develop around the project. It will also help ensure that existing customers have their needs met.

Bouvet will honor all support and maintenance contracts currently in effect, and we aim to continue selling such contracts. However, the specific terms of the new contracts will need to change to some degree as the project goes open source. More information on this will follow after the planning meeting.

We aim to achieve the following by 2010:

• Having an active community around the Ontopia project, consisting of developers, users, and discussions on the project web site
• That Ontopia is used in even more projects (whether run by Bouvet or not)
• Having a licensing and administration model which makes it attractive for other parties to use and contribute to Ontopia
• Having an offer of professional support on the product to both Bouvet customers and others

Plan:

• April-May: Bouvet to prepare the source code and project web site
• May 26th: Planning Meeting (consolidating meeting) where Bouvet meets interested parties to discuss how to achieve the best possible administration of the project. We will discuss issues like licensing, project administration, funding, etc. Suggestions and participation highly welcome!
• July 1st: Project is launched; source code is made available
• Q3/Q4: Code Camps where the community works on the software to fix bugs and add new requested features
• Q4: Ontopia under active development

More information: http://www.ontopia.net/faq.html

Mappa is a Topic Maps engine that is written in Python. Is it compatible to the Topic Maps Data Model and provides different backends. Some backends are also usable in a Jython environment. The API is Pythonic and enables the developer to create and manipulate topic maps easily. Additionally, Mappa provides the import and export of different Topic Maps syntaxes (i.e. XTM)

TMInspector is a small but powerful tool when working with topic maps, with it you can easily import and export maps as XTM 1.0 & 2.0, get information about the maps, and also merge them together. TMInspector is free-of-charge, open source, and part of the TM++ topic maps engine example suite.

Vegard Sandvold argues that Wikipedia serves as an excellent source of PSIs. This seems to be the route the Linked Data crowd are going with DBPedia forming the hub of their system.

I believe Topic Maps can draw benefits from Wikipedia’s democratic mechanisms, by making Wikipedia the universal authority of Topic Map PSI’s. If your topic map needs a new topic, check for an existing article on Wikipedia. If it doesn’t exist, author a new article, and use it’s URL as your new topic PSI.

Steve Pepper comments that he thinks disambiguation is problematic:

For Wikipedia URIs to be able to function as PSIs Wikipedia must explicitly designate one URI as the canonical URI for each subject, otherwise users won’t know which one to use.

as well as being possibly culturally biased towards English:

I for one would not be comfortable for English to become the default, because of the cultural bias this involves.

NetworkedPlanet’s take on web3 and ‘topic maps on the web’.

NetworkedPlanet now have a new “NetworkedPlanet Web 3″ blog discussing their take on Web 3 and Topic Maps. The first few posts have been based on the concept of a Subject Identity Resolution Service and the subsequent subj3ct.com website.

Topic Maps has been successful in delivering value in the context of content management, intranets and web publishing. In these contexts it has provided value in terms of improved navigation and findability of content. However, the scope of these projects has been limited, and it could be argued that Topic Maps has simply created better managed, and more useful silos of content. This talk presents a vision and concept for enabling Topic Maps in a global context.

We describe how the fundamental concept of Topic Maps, the separation of identity from addressing, can be taken and utilised in a global scale. This vision includes how people, who have invested in Topic Maps in the small, can contribute and benefit from this step change in the scope of Topic Maps usage.

Tying everything together at UiB

The restructuring of the University of Bergen web site required good arguments for bringing everything together in a single content management system, with a uniform graphical profile and information architecture.

The possibility offered by Topic Maps of building connections across all our activities in research, education and outreach, across organizational boundaries and between all the people involved in our the system became an important motivating factor in the process.

But, as always, the art of self-limitation applies. UiB has started with a small number of relationship types that provide a foundation for an ever-improving presentation of UiBs multifarious activities.

The new web site at the University of Bergen is based on Topic Maps and the Open Source content management tool ZTM.

This tutorial provides a solid introduction to Topic Maps for anyone who is a newcomer to the subject. It covers what topic maps are and what kinds of problems they can solve. The basic Topic Maps constructs (topics, associations and occurrences) are explained using the simple yet powerful TAO Model. More advanced topics, such as scope and identity, are also covered. The tutorial concludes with a review of real world Topic Maps applications.

Onotoa is an Eclipse-based ontology editor for Topic Maps. It has a graphical UML-like interface, an export function for the current TMCL-draft and a XTM export. Feel free to download and test it. It’s free!

XTM1toXTM2 is an XSLT 1.0 stylesheet to convert from XTM 1.0 to XTM 2.0.

“subjectlayer.com is a free public community driven forum for the topic maps community.” It covers a wide range of technologies. Seems pretty quiet but may be a place to capture users unfamiliar with the mailing lists.