Archive for December, 2007

FYI: Topic Maps 2008 is being held in Oslo, Norway on April 2-4 2008.

Topic Maps 2008 is targeted towards users and potential users of Topic Maps, in particular:

• Information architects, software engineers, and project managers working with portals and web sites;
• Knowledge officers responsible for intranet-based knowledge management;
• Corporate and commercial publishers;
• Public sector providers of information;
• Students and teachers of computer science and library and information science.

Links: Call for Presentations, Keynote Speakers.

When I was checking Avinor.no for updated info this evening, I discovered a cool UI control for viewing flight info: an Ajax-powered slider / “timeline”.

By sliding the bar, the user can control the departure / arrival info displayed in the grid beneath it. They’ve also done well on the design. Cool.

This month’s Scientific American (Dec 2007, 297:6) features an 8 pages long article entitled The Semantic Web in Action by Feigenbaum, L. et.al.

The authors basically discuss the Semantic Web vision as laid out by Tim Berners-Lee, et.al. in the famous 2001 The Semantic Web article, and how some steps towards such a Semantic Web have been made.

In it, they define the semantic web as

A set of formats and languages that find and analyze data on the World Wide Web, allowing consumers and businesses to understand all kinds of useful online information.

A tad general perhaps, but anyways… On the technology front, RDF/OWL and some uses and applications of these technologies, like FAOF, is mentioned, while a few use cases are discussed.

Although the use cases are interesting, the authors fail to even mention Topic Maps as a semantic web technology, and limit the technological discussion to RDF/OWL alone, stating that “The data language, called Resource Description Language (RDF)…” (emphasis added). (more…)