Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

May 10, 2017

Cloudera Introduces Topic Maps Extra-Lite

Filed under: Cloudera,Hue,SQL,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 7:36 pm

New in Cloudera Enterprise 5.11: Hue Data Search and Tagging by Romain Rigaux.

From the post:

Have you ever struggled to remember table names related to your project? Does it take much too long to find those columns or views? Hue now lets you easily search for any table, view, or column across all databases in the cluster. With the ability to search across tens of thousands of tables, you’re able to quickly find the tables that are relevant for your needs for faster data discovery.

In addition, you can also now tag objects with names to better categorize them and group them to different projects. These tags are searchable, expediting the exploration process through easier, more intuitive discovery.

Through an integration with Cloudera Navigator, existing tags and indexed objects show up automatically in Hue, any additional tags you add appear back in Cloudera Navigator, and the familiar Cloudera Navigator search syntax is supported.
… (emphasis in original)

Seventeen (17) years ago, ISO/IEC 13250:2000 offered users the ability to have additional names for tables, columns and/or any other subject of interest.

Additional names that could have scope (think range of application, such as a language), that could exist in relationships to their creators/users, exposing as much or as little information to a particular user as desired.

For commonplace needs, perhaps tagging objects with names, displayed as simple string is sufficient.

But if viewed from a topic maps perspective, that string display to one user could in fact represent that string, along with who created it, what names it is used with, who uses similar names, just to name a few of the possibilities.

All of which makes me think topic maps should ask users:

  • What subjects do you need to talk about?
  • How do you want to identify those subjects?
  • What do you want to say about those subjects?
  • Do you need to talk about associations/relationships?

It could be, that for day to day users, a string tag/name is sufficient. That doesn’t mean that greater semantics don’t lurk just below the surface. Perhaps even on demand.

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