RDF/Topic Map Interoperability survey

The Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group has published:
"A Survey of RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability Proposals"

Editors include giants from the Topic Map world, such as Steve Pepper and Lars Marius Garshol.

I still think Topic Maps have tremendous potential, and I wish there was more adoption of them. I tried to set up a Topic Map for the Sun System Handbook, while I was at Sun, but couldn't get approval to publish and set it up as a navigation mechanism for the Handbook.

It's definitely an interesting read, especially section 4.3 on Semantic mapping issues. Lars Marius Garshol has done tremendous work in this area, and the Ontopia Knowledge Suite has some incredible features for viewing/interacting with Topic Maps.

Categories: General

Care for some delicious bookmarks?

For those interested, I've converted my blog bookmarks (and some additional entries) into del.icio.us bookmarks at: http://del.icio.us/shudson310/

If you haven't heard about del.icio.us, it's a very interesting social bookmark manager. You can add create a personal collection of links, categorize those links with keywords, and share those categories and links with others!

You can also view the links collected by others, see who else bookmarked the same sites, and subscribe to other people's link collections.

In some ways, I see this very akin to a Topic Map, where you are mapping Topics to Occurences and the del.icio.us service creates the Associations between the Topics and the collection lists.

I think it would be very cool if the site provided the data, expressed in a Topic Map as an additional service...

See also: TopicMaps

Speaking of the Vizigator...

Looks like I posted my last article too soon! Ontopia released version 2.1 of the Ontopia Knowledge Suite (OKS) today.

I hope those of you who attended XML 2004 saw the Vizigator demo. It's incredibly powerful and easy to use. And here's a challenge to all of you RDF/OWL pundits: show me a tool like this for RDF that's as easy to use!

Here's a sample visualization of a topic map:

For those of you not at XML 2004, have no fear! You can download a free demo copy of the Omnigator 8 (which includes the Vizigator, as well as an RDF2TM plugin!) at: http://www.ontopia.net/download/freedownload.html.

As always, if you have no idea what topic maps are, please read Steve Pepper's excellent work: TAO of Topic Maps: Finding the Way in the Age of Infoglut

See also: TopicMaps

Generate documentation with dtddoc

I've just found another useful tool, for those dealing with schemas and documentation...

Lars Marius Garshol has had this tool out there since 2001, but I just ran across it trying to search for Content Model documentation.

dtddoc is a DTD documentation generator which can read a DTD and associated documentation written in XML and generate nicely formatted HTML documentation or, experimentally, DocBook RefEntry documentation.

It can create HTML, DocBook, and XML Topic Map (XTM) documentation, as well as read a DTD and generate a skeleton documentation file.

It's available at: http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/software/dtddoc/. Lars also has a cool list of XML tools available at: http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/xmltools/cat_ix.html

From Lars' tools page, the following DTD documentation tools are listed:

DTD documenters

Product	Vendor	Platforms
dtddoc	Lars Marius Garshol	Python
DTDDoc	Stefan Champailler	Java
DTDParse	Norman Walsh	Perl
LiveDTD	Robert Stayton	Perl
perlSGML	Earl Hood	Perl

UPDATE: There's an informative article on this subject at: http://builder.com.com/5100-6315-1051811.html

I would think there are similar tools for documenting XSD and RNG schemas. If you know of any, please send in your comments!

UPDATE: Kal Ahmed has produced some tools for RelaxNG documentation at: http://www.techquila.com/rng-tools.html. I've also found a for-$$ XSD/WSDL documenter at: http://www.bluetetra.com/

See also: XML

Finding WOD on Greimblog

Okay, that was a pretty confusing title, but thanks for clicking anyways ;-)

Bravo, Greg! Just found his recent entry (http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/greimer/20041008#tree_of_data_sea_of), where he discusses Webs of Data and Topic Maps. It's an interesting read, and now maybe Greg will be able to start experimenting with XTMs.

BTW, Greg and Lars, I'm still working on my Star Wars Topic Map. Perhaps it will be easier, now that I've found TSaxon to process the pages I need. Stay tuned...

See also: TopicMaps

Think Topic Maps

I looked a little deeper into musicplasma that fleers blogged on yesterday. Very cool site, that similar in some respects to the TMNav application of the TM4J project!

Turns out, musicplasma uses a product called ThinkMap, which based on J2EE. ThinkMap's whitepapers make no mention of whether they are using Topic Maps, RDF, OWL or some proprietary technology under the covers. They do have an XML configuration file that makes it very easy to use, combined with CSS styling for the presentation.

Very cool product. It would be nice to see some of the same visual presentation features in TMNav, or Ontopia's Omnigator.

Further digging revealed another product called The Brain, which also looks interesting, but unknown what it's based on under the covers.

Correction: Just got a comment from the musicplasma guys that they are NOT using ThinkMap engine, but have rolled their own. It was the Sony Music License engine, that used ThinkMap. Still, all of these visual representations certainly resemble Topic Maps. It would be nice if they could all adopt the Topic Map standard for interoperability, instead of going the proprietary route.

Update: Just heard from the ThinkMap folks, and they said, "Thinkmap does not use topic maps, but rather uses tables from a relational database (or practically any other data source, for that matter)." Ditto my comment above. Hopefully some of these companies will adopt some of the Semantic Web standards, to enable interoperability.

See also: TopicMaps

Welcome to Topic Maps, Norm!

I'm very excited to see Norm Walsh's post about Topic Maps today!

I've been trying to get Topic Maps adopted in our Services organization for several years, but RDF/OWL seem to be the heavy hitters so far.

I think Topic Maps are extremely valuable, and offer a number of advantages over RDF. (see my previous post)And it's an ISO standard to boot! (ISO/IEC 13250). Now that Norm is experimenting with them, perhaps topic maps can get more traction at Sun.

Murray Altheim has also been a big proponent of topic maps, but ran into a lot of the same hurdles I have.

If anyone else at Sun has experimented with Topic Maps, or would like to learn more, please contact me!

See also: TopicMaps

OSIS - "a common format for many visions."

I ran across this very cool project while looking for Topic Map projects. While this project is more related to a standard format (XML) for tagging Biblical texts, Topic Maps would be a great technology for Concordance, and other references works.

Steve DeRose and Patrick Durusau are some of the key technologists on the project.

What is the OSIS initiative? The mission of the Bible Technologies Group is to maximize production, distribution, access, use, impact, and preservation of the Bible and related materials from all time periods. Co-sponsored by the American Bible Society and the Society of Biblical Literature, the OSIS initiative plays a key role in meeting this goal by providing a common format to facilitate production, distribution, etc. of the Bible and related materials. Since people engage with the Bible at a number of levels - as literature, as a religious text, etc. - OSIS is "a common format for many visions."

If you are interested in getting involved, check out their site at: http://www.bibletechnologies.net/

If I can make the time, I'd very much like to help out with this project.

See also: TopicMaps

Star Wars Topic Map

I've been working on a Star Wars topic map for over a year, practicing with the technology and using the free Ontopia Omnigator to view them. I've also used the open source TM4J tools, which are also very cool. I've been trying to auto-populate the topic map using the data from the Official Star Wars databank, but a lot of the work is still manual, and the map isn't complete enough to publish (this is a spare, spare time project...)

For all I know, someone may have already done this work...

I've actually met the Topic Map spec creators, Michel Biezunski and Steven R. Newcomb several times at the IDEAlliance XML and Extreme Markup conferences. I've also met Ontopian Lars Marius Garshol and TM4J's Kal Ahmed at the same.

Topic maps are powerful, easy to learn, and very cool. I've tried to drive their adoption in my organization for several years, but I guess I'm not high enough on the food chain.

Topic Maps are an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 13250 [ http://www.y12.doe.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0322_files/iso13250-2nd-ed-v2.pdf]).

Here's a summary of the technology pulled from various sources, including Ontopia's whitepapers on the subject (No plagarism is intended.):

RDF and OWL are similar technologies, but Topic Maps can describe relationships between topics and ideas that are not tied specifically to a URI (a limitation of RDF). RDF contexts are also application specific. There is no standard way to specify contexts of assertions. Topic maps are more flexible and powerful than simple taxonomies, thesauri or controlled vocabularies. Topic map semantics, however, can be expressed in RDF triples, allowing RDF engines to query and navigate topic maps.

With topic maps you create an index of information which resides outside of specific documents or databases. The topic map takes the key concepts described in the databases and documents and relates them together independently in a neutral envelope, hospitable to any existing or future schema for knowledge representation.

Topic maps thus provide a common layer for managing interconnected sets of information objects. The result is an information structure that is uniquely different from a traditional information hierarchy. A topic map usually contains several overlapping hierarchies which are rich with semantic cross-links. This solution is perfect for all sorts of portals, catalogs, site indexes, and so on. Since a topic map can represent knowledge about the things it describes, topic maps are also ideal as knowledge management tools.

See also: TopicMaps