Google Alerts recently notified me of Digital Collection, a German supplier of software for managing and research of digital information, which has created a topic maps based tool for news monitoring, research, archiving, workflows and now content creation called DC-X.

From the company’s blog entry:

The benefits of treating thesaurus and list terms as topics in a topic map:

• Built-in support for multiple names, which we’re using to store translations for terms: All lists and thesauri can now be multi-lingual.
• Class/instance relationship between terms; the “City” list is itself a topic, “Hamburg” and “Oslo” are instances of the “City” topic. This way an unlimited number of lists or thesauri can co-exist. Terms can even belong to multiple lists.
• Arbitrary relations between terms: A thesaurus hierarchy is modeled using associations like “broader/narrower” or “synonym/preferred term”. Geographic hierarchies can use “part/whole” associations.
• External identifier URIs can be specified for any term, so metadata can be mapped to metadata of other software using RDF, or anything else that points to the same URI.
• Custom metadata can be attached to any term. We’ll use this for thesaurus “scope notes”, geo coordinates for cities etc.

They also mention that it is implemented based on XTM, why they chose not to use RDF, how the tool can be used, as well as plans for implementing a topic map browser and editor.

Alexander Johannesen’s Event Model Ontology

While blogging I might as well be the first one (?) to link to Alexander Johannesen’s “Missing ontological serinity in the world of software systems architecture” and “What event model ontology?”