Get a cup of coffee and set your timer!
*****
The best way to explain topic maps is to say why we want them in the first place.
I have a set of food/recipe/FDA documents.
Some use the term salt.
Some use the term sodium chloride.
Some use the term NaCl.
Walmart wants to find information on salt/sodium chloride/NaCl, no matter how it is identified.
Not a hypothetical use case: Walmart Launches Major Initiative to Make Food Healthier and Healthier Food More Affordable
Topic maps would enable Walmart to use any one identification for salt, and to retrieve all the information about it, recorded using any of its identifications.*
How?
Topics represent subjects and can have multiple, independent identifications of the same subject.
That sounds cool!
Can I talk about relationships too? Like they do in the tabloids? 😉
Well, sure, but we call those associations.
Let’s keep with the salt theme.
What about: Mark Kurlansky wrote “Salt: A World History”.
How many subjects to you see?
Mark Kurlansky (subject) wrote “Salt: A World History” (subject).
Two right?
But Mark is probably in a lot of associations, both professional and personal. How do we keep those straight?
Topic maps identify another three subjects:
Mark Kurlansky (subject) (role – author) wrote (subject – written-by) “Salt: A World History” (subject) (role – work).
Mark is said to “play” the role of author in the association. “Salt: A World History” plays the role of a work in the association.
Means we can find all the places where Mark plays the author role, as opposed to husband role, speaker role, etc.
One more thing rounds out the typical topic map, occurrences.
Occurrences are used to write down places where we have seen a subject discussed.
That is we say that Mark Kurlansky (subject) occurs at:
http://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm?book_number=960
(How am I doing for time?)
That’s it.
To review:
- Topics represent subjects that can have multiple identifications.
- Use of any identifier should return information recorded using any identifiers for the same subject.
- Associations are relationships between subjects (role-players) playing roles.
- Occurrences are pointers to where subjects are discussed.
Exercise:
Choose any subject that you like to talk about. Now answer the following questions about your subject:
- Name at least three ways it is identified when people talk about it.
- Name at least one association and the roles in it for your subject.
- Name at least three occurrences (discussions) of your subject that you would like to find again.
Congratulations! Except for the syntax, you have just gathered all the information you need for your first topic map.
*****
* The salt example is only one of literally hundreds of thousands of multiple identifier type issues that confronts any consumer of information.
Walmart could use topic maps to collate information of interest to its 140 million customers every week and to deliver that as a service both to its customers as well as other commercial consumers of information.
A contrast to the U-Sort-It model of Google, which delivers dumpster loads of information, over and over again, for the same request.
PS: There are more complex issues and nuances of the syntaxes but this is the essence of topic maps.
[…] I pointed out in Topic Maps in < 5 Minutes, topic maps take it as given that: […]
Pingback by Topic Maps and the Semantic Web « Another Word For It — February 21, 2011 @ 6:56 am
Heh. “dumpster loads” indeed!! 😉
Nice intro, Patrick.
Comment by Andrew S. Townley — February 21, 2011 @ 4:37 pm
@Andrew, Glad you liked it!
After thinking about it, I think I have a better franchise name for Google search results, watch for it.
Planning on mining the news for places were topic maps are an obvious fit.
Suggestions welcome!
Comment by Patrick Durusau — February 21, 2011 @ 8:10 pm
Now that’s something nice and concrete. You got me interested (-;
Let me ask question which may come to the minds of people just getting started:
What about all the other properties like the Mark’s birthdate or the molar mass of salt. How does this stuff look like in a topic map?
I guess the ingredients of a recipe use associations somehow, but what about the amounts to use of each ingredient? And what about the list of steps to realize the recipe? How do I keep the steps in order?
I’m looking forward to part two. I’d even give you more than 5 minutes for that.
Comment by Benjamin Bock — February 23, 2011 @ 12:09 pm
@Benjamin – Thanks!
All of these are modeling questions and probably should have more visibility than being buried in a response. 😉
I am going to clean this up and make a page out of it, and post “part two,” which will probably take several “part two” postings to deal with the issues you raise. Will edit this reply thread to point at those posts (note I did not say answers, 😉 ) as I post them.
Working title for a reply to one of your questions: “…with a grain of salt” (for the molar mass question).
Comment by Patrick Durusau — February 23, 2011 @ 1:54 pm