The recent release of QuaaxTM made me wonder how many people comfortable with the LAMP stack are aware of QuaaxTM?
There is the Topic Maps Tools page by Lars Marius Garshol, which is always the first place I look for new software, but how many non-topic map users would know to look there?
I am thinking that we need a two-fold strategy:
1) Use Lars’ lists of software to create “flyers” as it were for particular languages/platforms. (Communities that use Python are probably not interested in C++ libraries.)
2) “Distribute” those flyers when appropriate (no spamming) in discussions in other communities. With pointers back to Topic Maps Tools.
The metadata associated with the current listings makes the tools easy to find, but that is a pull information model.
I am thinking more along the lines of a push information model.
If you think about advertising, it is all based on a push information model.
Maybe there is a lesson there for the topic maps community.
Coming from the perspective of someone who recently discovered Topic Maps, I agree that wider advertising would help but I don’t think it is sufficient. I happened across the technology while search for a general purpose solution for a specific application but it did take a while. Topic Maps is not a subject that jumps right out at you when you start looking into semantic technologies, ontologies, information discovery, information architecture, knowledge organization, or search technologies. “Advertising” would help with that.
After finding it, the next problem is the big step in the middle of the leaning curve. There are a lot of good introductions to the concepts, structures, standards, and terminology. At the other end, there are also a lot of frameworks and a lot of academic papers about how to apply Topic Maps to one computing problem or another. I found (find) the part of the learning curve where information is lacking is the middle of curve where one needs to use the concepts and terminology along with one or the other framework to create a working program based on Topic Maps.
To bridge that gap, it would be helpful to be able to see a documented Topic Map solution or a tutorial for building a solution for a small problem that is easy to solve with Topic Maps but hard to solve without them (the NorthWind example of Topic Maps). For that matter, it would be even better to have a canonical Topic Map problem that is solved with each of the frameworks so one could learn by comparing different variations of what others had already done.
Comment by clemp — May 10, 2011 @ 6:24 pm
clemp: Good points, both of them.
Takers anyone?
I suspect that like science reports that describe experiments and thought processes as they should be done that the process of creating topic maps is often described in should be done terms and not how it actually happens. 😉
I have a smallish topic map on standard citation practices that I hope to finish in the next month or so. I will see what I can do about documenting the raw bits, mis-steps, etc., along with the first edition of it. (It is likely to be under constant revision.)
Comment by Patrick Durusau — May 11, 2011 @ 4:06 pm
Patrick, that sounds like it would be something that is small enough for us newcomers to understand and learn from. Even the constant revision would be helpful in being able to follow how one information model might lead to limitations and how a variation of that model can remove those limits.
After learning enough about Topic Maps to understand their strength, I was surprised that I found very little application of Topic Maps to personal note-taking. That is an area everyone can relate to but where the existing applications are very poor compared to what is needed.
Personal notes, research notes, requirements gathering note, lawyers case notes, etc. tend to be very inter-related with a single note related to multiple topics but almost all existing products structure notes as a list, a tree, or a hyperlinked wiki so finding all related notes is always hard. It seems like a perfect fit for Topic Maps but the only application I have found is Goozzee at http://goozzee.sourceforge.net/
Unfortunately, it’s not open source so it’s not a good tool for learning how to apply Topic Maps.
By the way, I’d like to thank you for your blog. It has been a great source of links to important information as I have been trying to learn this new (to me) technology.
Comment by clemp — May 12, 2011 @ 6:23 am