Germany, Topic Maps, and lots of beer

Seems I’ve missed out on lots of beer.

TMRA 2007 — “Scaling Topic Maps”, a conference for research and applications into topic maps in Leipzig, Germany, has just finished and I’m sure that their version of IA-Beers is just starting.

What is a Topic Map? They are a semantic technology designed to help with the integration of information and knowledge, and is closely connected with other information-centric technologies. Lars Marius Garshol, founder of Ontopia, had the following things to say about this two day event:

“Marc Wilhelm Küster gave the keynote, titled “Scaling Topic Maps”. He gave a quick review of uses and representations of knowledge over the last millennium or so, such as hierarchical classifications, encyclopaedias, etc. He compared Topic Maps-based portals to the encyclopaedia, and found that they are conceptually not so different. To really go beyond the old paradigms, he claims, we need to be able to share knowledge across different repositories.

“Stefan Smolnik presented on search and Topic Maps, based on a practical case from the chemical industry. In the chemical industry, knowledge systems typically have a wide variety of information sources, and the challenge is how to collect and structure all of this in an effective way.

“Heimo Hänninen, Antti Rauramo, and Sirpa Ruokangas then spoke on a Topic Maps project to build a user portal for Nokia Siemens Networks. The starting point for the project is complaints from the users about the current portal: that they can’t find information, that search is poor, that other portals have more advanced functionality, etc. Their goals are to solve this, build bridges between the information silos, increase customer satisfactory and ultimately bring topic maps applications into the Enterprise Architecture space by merging the product data management (PDM) model and a content CMS model.

“They’ve given each product what they call a “product centre”, which is really a topic page for the product topic, showing an overview of everything that’s known about the product. They also have relations to the various editions of the product, and a nice faceted browser for the product’s documentation. There are also relations to other products, etc, as well as personalized information. The data size for the portal is not too bad: more than 600 products, with 1-5 variants of each, and 1-5 releases being sold.

“Robert Barta presented on Knowledge-Oriented Middleware using Topic Maps. Robert’s idea was about 10 years old, but it’s only now that he’s been able to realise it. What he really wants to with Topic Maps as middleware is to do syndication of Topic Maps content, and to make it possible for Topic Maps fragments to float around a landscape of knowledge syndication peers.

“Benjamin Bock spoke on RTM (Ruby Topic Maps), his Topic Maps engine written in Ruby. It has an RDBMS backend based on Active Record that enables him to plug in other backends as well. He does have support for import and export of XTM. The API has lots of conveniences that make it nice to use. He also has an API of enumerable sets that allow the user to emulate a query language in the API.

“Stian Danenbarger and Arnar Lundesgaard spoke on ZTM (Zope Topic Maps) — a Topic Maps engine and CMS that’s been used for many, many Norwegian Topic Maps-driven portals. It’s open source, and was developed originally by Ontopia, but has since been reimplementation at least once by the Bouvet guys.

“The project started when a client came to them wanting to create a portal about their organisation — a complex, network-like structure that was constantly changing. The client made a leap of faith and went from not knowing Topic Maps at all and not having an implementation to building a customer solution within the scope of this single project — all within budget, on time (very impressive).

“They built the system on Zope, which gave them a lot of help. It provided the object database (Zodb) and the publishing platform with lots of helpful functionality. That it was written in Python didn’t hurt, either.”

It all just sounds so very cool — particularly from an IA-sort of perspective. Maybe next year I’ll attend. Maybe by then I’ll even have a topic maps project to talk to.

M

A new Topic Maps Engine!

I’ve been building a topic maps engine for nearly 2 years. In the last few months I figured that it’s probably about time to actually release a version — 1.0 beta. Here’s a few details:

• It’s coded in ASP Classic — so it’s nice and easy to understand and modify
• It uses MSXML – so its pretty fast
  
• It uses AJAX for edit-in-place of content of topics and adding new relationships to topics
• It has a Web Service for editing topics and displaying topics
• It uses Alex Johannessen’s own topic maps notation that we worked together on while doing National Treasures at the National Library — so representation of the topics in the topic map is simple

You can see the topic map engine in action at: topicmaps.matthew.hodgson.com

I’m trying to get an administration page together to allow better management of the engine when transferred to different environments. That is, to allow it to be plopped into any IIS environment, have its folders/file location specified, the site name, etc, and have it be ready to go. I’ll keep you posted on that front.

If you’ve got any suggestions on how I might continue its development, please give me a buzz. If you’re interested in using it, let me know. It will be available under a GNU General Public License.

Any thoughts?

M

Topic maps: What to do with disconnected information

I’ve been busy writing a presentation on topic maps for a work sales conference in Melbourne. The timing is going to be tight as I’m presenting with three other consultants in a period of only 45 minutes. As I was writing, I was reminded of a message given to me at our recent corporate think-tank retreat:

Make sure you have your key message ready. If you run out of time it will allow you to sum up your whole presentation.

This is really good advice because even though I’m planning on only using 10 minutes, I think I’m bound to run out time. Deciding on what my key message is, though, has been a little difficult.

Steve Pepper of Ontopia, the nordic god of topic maps, recently made a comment on my blog about topic maps, acknowledging what I had said earlier about them:

“It’s a way of representing knowledge and information in the way that people (humans rather than machines) think about the knowledge and information inside their heads - that is, in terms of relationships, rather than a strict hierarchy or an unstructured cloud of tags.”

I think for the sales conference this is a good message, particularly since the key people present will be account managers who have to know how to sell the concept to prospective clients.

Steve also reminded me, though, that topic maps are an international standard, allowing topic maps to be shared, reused and merged with other systems. This is an important factor when the message is being communicated to the tech-heads afterward. I know there’ll be lots of schmoozing at this conference so I figured I need to arm myself with this message as well, plus a few more. Moreover, given the example I was using, I needed to answer the question “how can you bring two different world-views of disconnected information together?”

I went to the Ontopia website for some inspiration. They’ve recently released a PDF brochure called “Only Connect” and I think the messages inside will be great ammunition:

The more our computers are connected the more we realise how disconnected our information is

While metadata, taxonomies and ontologies are good, alone they only provide a fragmented view of information. Topic maps, however, can bring all of these disconnected views of information together

Topic maps go beyond traditional methods of information management. They connect different views of information by helping to manage the meaning behind information

Topic maps provide a way of articulating what information exists [in people's heads] and how it is related to other pieces of knowledge and information.

Topic maps can provide that point of connection for disconneted information.

So, I’ve put them into my presentation, armed my head with these answers in anticipation of the questions I’ll get once it comes to questin time. Let’s see what happens!

M