Authorities and Vocabularies at the Library of Congress offers bulk downloads of some of their authorities and vocabularies. Like the Library of Congress subject headings!
Granted it is in RDF but your topic map application is going to encounter RDF eventually. You may as well develop some experience at incorporating it into your topic map as you would any other subject identification system.
Networked Planet has released a beta of Web3 Platform with free downloads during the beta period.
In addition to supporting RDF and Topic Maps, the platform also supports Sd-Share (think syndication and synchronization of multiple semantic stores).
I will have to rely on the reports of others on its installation and operation. I don’t have a Windows Server although this might tempt me into getting one.
Compact RDF to Topic Maps (CRTM) is a draft mapping from RDF to Topic Maps from Lars Heuer.
CRTM mappings are re-usable, which according to Lars is not possible with other RDF syntaxes. (Why would anyone re-use a mapping when they can re-invent it? Re-invention is much safer than actual progress.)
I don’t know if Lars Heuer and the Topic Maps Lab are competing to see who can release the most interesting topic map software/tools but they are making the rest of us look like laggards. 😉
Or have I missed something really cool/important that others have released recently?
Lars Heuer has released an online RDF to Topic Maps coversion web service!
Mappify – RDF to Topic Maps is the place!
No need for a topic maps engine or an RDF store. Streams RDF in and Topic Maps format out.
See his post for more details: ANN: Online RDF to Topic Maps Converter.
If you find this interesting, useful, etc., you can find contact information for Lars Heuer at: www.semagia.com
representing scientific discourse, or: why triples are not enough by Anita de Waard, Disruptive Technologies Director (how is that for a cool title?), Elsevier Labs, merits a long look.
I won’t spoil the effect by trying to summarize the presentation. It is only 23 slides long.
Read those slides carefully and then get yourself to: Rhetorical Document Structure Group HCLS IG W3C. Read, discuss, contribute.
PS: Based on this slide pack I am seriously thinking of getting a Twitter account so I can follow Anita. Not saying I will but am as tempted as I have ever been. This looks very interesting. Fertile ground for discussion of topic maps.
I do not think it means what you think it means by Taylor Cowan is a deeply amusing take on Pellet, an OWL 2 Reasoner for Java.
I particularly liked the line:
I believe the semantic web community is falling into the same trap that the AI community fell into, which is to grossly underestimate the meaning of “reason”. As Inigo Montoya says in the Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
(For an extra 5 points, what is the word?)
Taylor’s point that Pellet will underscore unstated assumptions in an ontology and make sure that your ontology is consistent is a good one. If you are writing an ontology to support inferences that is a good thing.
Topic maps can support “consistent” ontologies but I find encouragement in their support for how people actually view the world as well. That some people “logically” infer from Boeing 767 -> “means of transportation” should not prevent me from capturing that some people “logically” infer -> “air-to-ground weapon.”
A formal reasoning system could be extended to include that case, but can that be done as soon as an analyst has that insight or must it be carefully crafted and tested to fit into a reasoning system when “the lights are blinking red?”
Leigh Dodds and Ian Davis have published an early draft of Linked Data Patterns.
I haven’t had time to look at the content but will be commenting on it in later posts.
Update: Other formats:
In No 303’s for Topic Maps? I mentioned that distinguishing between identifiers and addresses with 303’s has architectural implications.
The most obvious one is the additional traffic that 303 traffic is going to add to the Web.
Another concern is voiced in the Cool URIs for the Semantic Web document when it says:
Content negotiation, with all its details, is fairly complex, but it is a powerful way of choosing the best variant for mixed-mode clients that can deal with HTML and RDF.
Great, more traffic, it isn’t going to be easy to implement, what else could be wrong?
It is missing the one feature that made the Web a successful hypertext system when more complex systems failed. The localization of failure is missing from the Semantic Web.
If you follow a link and a 404 is returned, then what? Failure is localized because your document is still valuable. It can be processed just like before.
What if you need to know if a URL is an identifier for “people, products, places, ideas and concepts such as ontology classes”? If the 303 fails, you don’t get that information.
It is important enough information for the W3C to invent ways to fix the failure of RDF to distinguish between identifiers and resource addresses.
But the 303 fix puts you at the mercy of an unreliable network, unreliable software and unreliable users.
With triples relying on other triples, failure cascades. The system has one billion points of potential failure, the reported number of triples.
The Semantic Web only works if our admittedly imperfect systems, built and maintained by imperfect people, running over imperfect networks, don’t fail, maybe. I would rather take my chances with a technology that works for imperfect users, that would be us. The technology would be topic maps.
I was puzzled that articles on 303’s, such as Cool URIs for the Semantic Web never mention topic maps. Then I remembered, topic maps don’t need 303’s!
Topic maps distinguish between URIs used as identifiers and URIs which are the addresses of resources.
Even if the Internet is down, a topic map can distinguish between an identifier and the address of a resource.
Topic maps use the URIs identified as identifiers to determine if topics are representing the same subjects.
Even if the Internet is down, a topic map can continue to use those identifiers for comparison purposes.
Topic maps use the URIs identified as subject locators to determine if topics are representing the same resource as a subject.
Even if the Internet is down, a topic map can continue to use those subject locators for comparison purposes.
You know what they say: Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is an engineering principle.
The engineering principle? And its consequences? Keep watching this space, I want to massage it a bit before posting.
*****
Techies see: kill -9 ‘/dev/cat’ (Robert Barta, one of my co-editors).
Non-Techies/Techies see: Topic Maps Lab.
Spec readers: XTM (syntax), Topic Maps Data Model.
Not all there is so say about topic maps but you have to start somewhere.
*****
Apologies! News on CTM (Compact Topic Map syntax) most likely tomorrow. Apologies for the delay.
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