One of the reasons I suggested having a podcast based topic maps conference is that watching presentations by others always (or nearly so) inspires me with new ideas.
Take Lars Marius Garshol’s presentation this morning, Topic Maps – Human Oriented Semantics?
While musing over the presentation, I was reminded of the line from the Tin Man, …Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man / That he didn’t, didn’t already have….
If you don’t remember the story, the Wizard of Oz gives the Tin Man a heart, which he obviously had through out the story.
Anyway, I think one take away from Lars’ presentation is that users don’t need to go looking for experts in order to have semantics.
Users already have semantics and topic maps are a particularly clever way for users to express their semantics using their understanding of those semantics.
May or may not fit into classical, neo-classical, rough or fuzzy logic.
What matters is that a topic map represents subjects and their relationships as understood by the users of the topic map.
Users already have semantics, they just need topic maps in order to express them!
[…] The Tin Man for my take away from the […]
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