Informational resources about Topic Maps.
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.
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’.
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.
“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.
Web 2.0 has reached the limits of what can be achieved on the technical platform of Web 1.0; new technologies must be put in place to provide a fundamentally new technical infrastructure, or platform, to enable the next generation of innovative web applications. Key to this Web 3.0 platform is a set of protocols and formats that allow the communication of subjects and people’s perceptions of those subjects between computers, and that enable new applications to be built that allow users to create, share and integrate information and knowledge seamlessly…
The purpose of this application is mainly to show Topic Maps case examples for sales promotion of Topic Maps. 67 presentations are included in this topic map at the moment. Those were presented at Topic Maps 2007 in Oslo, TMRA 2007 in Leipzig and AToMS 2007 in Kyoto. More presentations and case examples will be added in the near future.
Interview of Infolooms’s Michel Biezunski on the Story of Topic Maps at the New York City Semantic Web Meetup on November 20, 2008.
Topic Maps is an international standard technology for describing knowledge structures and using them to improve the findability of information. It is based on a formal model that subsumes those of traditional finding aids such as indexes, glossaries, and thesauri, and extends them to cater for the additional complexities of digital information.
Topic Maps is increasingly used in Enterprise Information Integration, Knowledge Management, e-Learning, and Digital Libraries, and as the foundation for web-based information delivery solutions. This article provides a comprehensive treatment of the core concepts, as well as describing the background and current status of the standard and its relationship to traditional knowledge organization techniques.
Lars Marius Garshol has produced a Topic Map Tools topic map which no doubt accurately and completely covers the field 
.If you don’t find what you are after here then I suggest checking it out.
Topic Maps Tools is a frequently-updated and hopefully complete index of tools and software supporting Topic Maps, with much metadata about the tools to make them easier to locate. (Built, of course, with Topic Maps.)
It is possible to browse by
Some recent studies on information retrieval and information seeking have examined the utility of serendipitous discovery. This research argues that serendipitous discovery has a positive impact on information retrieval and can happen most frequently in semantic web built on the framework of topic maps. This paper discusses the components of topic map that influence serendipitous discovery as well as the elements of topic map designs that may enhance serendipitous discovery. To that end the results of a study on the effects of serendipitous discovery in topic-map-based ontology systems are discussed in the context of information seeking.
Most clustering methods for information retrieval application do not work efficiently when dealing with complicated data. In this paper, we compare the performance of the Topic Maps-based method with the Clustering-based method. An experimental test was carried out using 20 volunteer to evaluate and compare the performance of the Topic Maps-based Information Retrieval system and Clustering-based Information Retrieval system in security domain. The experimental results show that a Topic Maps-based method provides both better recall/precision and shorter search time/search steps.
Connecting Topincs – Using transclusion to connect proxy spaces
Topincs is a software system for agile and distributed knowledge management on top of the common web infrastructure and the Topic Maps Data Model. It segments knowledge into stores and offers users a way to establish a temporary connection between stores through transclusion and merging. This allows them to easily copy topics and statements. Through this mechanism later acts of integration are simplified, because of matching item identifiers. Furthermore transclusion can be used to create permanent connections between stores.
A number of proposals have been made for Topic Maps/OWL interoperability, but this is really looking for interoperability on the wrong level. This paper instead looks at interoperability between OWL and TMCL, and shows how it is possible to convert OWL ontologies into TMCL schemas and vice versa, once a mapping for the vocabulary is available.
Due to the increasing amount and complexity of digital resources, there are several critical issues that arise in digital environments such as ill-structured and poor management of digital information. Different information organization approaches have been used to address these issues. In particular, Semantic Web has been explored for 10 years; however there are not many practical applications. This is in part due to the fact that much attention has been given to the creation rather than the migration of existing data. In addition, the lack of guidelines for choosing the right migration approach, whether Topic Maps or Resource Description Framework (RDF), needs to be addressed. This paper presents a comparison of Semantic Web Data Models (Topic Maps and RDF), followed by an example of migration of existing metadata into ontology-based data for Semantic Web.
This paper introduces a new generation of the common Topic Maps API (TMAPI). It has evolved from version 1.0 and is now based on the meanwhile finalized Topic Maps Data Model (TMDM). A comprehensive developer experience allowed the design of a user-friendly API for Topic Maps application development independently of a specific Topic Maps processor.
Among TMDM compliance, the design objectives also covered the consideration of the TMDM constraints as well as developer convenience requirements, basic filtering and simplification. For more complex filter operations a filter language has been drafted.
When developing topic maps and their applications, key challenges are how to pick up the main subjects in targeted domains and how to systematize those subjects. This paper introduces a topic map development about topic map case examples. It also introduces what kinds of subjects were extracted and how the identifiers of those subjects were given and how those subjects were classified in the first version. Then the difficulties which were emerged during the development are discussed. In order to promote sharing of the case examples and make good use of them, I provide some consideration and future works.
This paper introduces a new, event-based API to create topic maps. It is independent of particular Topic Maps processors and enables developers to convert any resource into a Topic Maps representation with minimal effort. The API is somewhat aligned to the “push-model” of the familiar Simple API for XML (SAX) and is therefore easy to learn. It has been implemented for different programming languages and supplements APIs like the object-orientated Topic Maps API (TMAPI).
Construction of an introductory physics e-learning system based on Topic Maps is discussed in view of subject-centric design of web-based learning. A pilot system with a visualized Topic Maps portal was created and utilized for students’ self-study of university lectures. The aim of this system is to provide a platform where learners can design their study by themselves, and extend their study into information resources on the Internet. The students’ response to an inquiry on their impressions of the pilot system suggested that the Topic Maps portal is useful for figuring out the relationships of knowledge, and that navigation for the order of learning materials was required for beginners. Further, an e-Learning Topic Maps system that consists of three main domains, i.e., physics subjects, learning resource types, and study record types, was created to improve the system extensible in physics related knowledge and in the types of associations between subjects.
Currently, the most common way to programmatically access Topic Maps data is the use of a Topic Maps API, like TMAPI. Another approach, besides the use of a query language like TMQL, is the encapsulation of the Topic Maps related code in domain-specific model classes. This concept is similar to object-relational mapping (ORM) which encapsulates access to a relational database inside the model classes. These techniques decouple the data store specific code from the business logic. For ORM, there are several prevalent design patterns, most notable the Active Record pattern by Fowler. For Topic Maps, no such pattern is established. This paper introduces Active Topic Maps, a pattern for topic maps — object mapping, the domain-specific language ActiveTMML to define such a mapping and a prototypical implementation, called ActiveTM. ActiveTM is based on Ruby Topic Maps and also supports the generation of web-formulars based on ActiveTMML definitions. This full-featured software stack greatly improves the development productivity of Topic Maps based portals compared to other solutions.
The aim of the Topic Maps application for astronomers and visitors of Observatory and Planetarium in Hradec Králové is to help them to search resources related to astronomy. The Topic Maps document can be immediately consulted during presentations and courses for public and can be reused for creation of web presentation of the Observatory. In the paper the process of the application development is summarized.
The core of the second generation Topic Maps standards (TMDM, XTM2.0) has been finalized, yet the uptake is still slow. In this paper, we highlight engineering considerations for a novel backend for the TM4J open source topic maps engine, which is currently in development, but already usable for some purposes. As the name suggests, the “TMDM” backend is designed to reflect the TMDM specification closely. In fact, it is much closer to the TMDM than to the internal legacy TM4J data model (which is based on the XTM 1.0 data model). This motivates a bridging layer between the TMDM and the XTM 1.0 data model. We emphasize how merging is implemented in the “TMDM” backend and conclude with some synthetic merging benchmarks of the current “TMDM” backend prototype.
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