Semantic Web Archive

Better late than never…

Topic Maps 2008 - Day 1

Alex Wright of New York Times held the opening keynote of Topic Maps 2008. Wright talked about “Hierarchies, Networks, and the web that Wasn’t“.

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I am currently at the 2nd International Topic Maps Conference, held in Oslo, Norway; Topic Maps 2008. Today was tutorial day.

This is what I got some insight into today (they are all bits and pieces, but I include the notes here for sharing).

Open Source Topic Map Portals

Arnar Lundesgaard, the lead developer of Zope Topic Maps, held a 1/2 day presentation on ZTM3. For me, it was vital to attend this introduction to ZTM3, as I have high hopes for it … and we will def. be building sites on it in the not too distant future.

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The first version of WP2TM is just around the corner.

I’ve set up a separate page for WP2TM, and will be posting news about it there (see also: releases feed).

Update: I’ve just made the plug-in available for download.  Happy blogging

I’ve changed the Wordpress Topic Maps Plugin a bit, so that the produced topic map is more correct (thanks for input :)). I’ve tried using PSIs where possible (from e.g. Ontopedia and Techquila), and have sought inspiration (=>”copy+paste”) from Dmitry’s XTM feed over at SubjectCentric.com. A few issues remain:

• I’ve had problems getting the darn get_tag(_x) functions of Wordpress to work, and hence do not yet output Blog Post <-> Tag associations. I intend to figure this one out, though, and create dc:subject associations scoped by the post’s author.
• Should the subject identity of a category (category PSI anyone?) take the form of a subject indicator, or a subject locator? In other words: is it what you find at the end of the URL that is the category? I believe not, so I’ve left these as indicators for now … objections?
• XTM fragments for individual posts (todo)
• Users should be able to set options via admin interface (next version, I guess)

I’ll make a new home for the plugin at www.topicobserver.com/wp2tm, so that this blog won’t fill up with entries like the one you just read…

It seems like the program for Topic Maps 2008 has been released (in a provisional form). It is also possible to register for the conference.

Update Feb. 15th: the program is now official. Be sure to check it - or the excellent list of Presentations - out!

Dmitry wishes to see more blogs in XTM format.

Now, this is far from being a Topic Maps driven blog, or blog in XTM-format, but I figured it would be fun to write a Topic Maps “feed” plugin for Wordpress (inspired by Lars Marius Garshol’s Blog Metadata in Topic Maps).

So from today (or evening, if you wish), this blog delivers an XTM 1.0 feed. The plugin’s source code is not perfect — and kinda ugly, but feel free to look at it and/or use it if you wish to (I wont guarantee anything, of course, not even the accuracy of the outputted topic map ;). (more…)

Recently, I stumbled upon a comment (Norwegian) about the semantics of Web 2.0 technologies, which prompted a response.

Since the response turned out rather lengthy, and a bit off-topic, I decided to post it here. Hopefully, it can be of use to others as well.

Web 2.0

Although the Web 2.0 has been hyped as something big and new for a while now, and things such as tag clouds are a popular part of many Web 2.0 sites, Web 2.0 sites build on old technologies (+user generated content). It’s all just (X)HTML + JavaScript and CSS. No magic.

There is not much semantics to Web 2.0. The semantics of HTML is still limited to layout/presentation of information (as will HTML5’s be). Even though one can express the start/end of a paragraph or heading, one can for example not explicitly state what an article is about (except through limited meta elements), or how different “topics” — or even what kind of topics we’re talking about — are related.

There is no way to explicitly state that “this article is about X and mentions Y”.

The tag clouds of Web 2.0 are in effect just free-floating words, and do as such not bring anything new to the table (an exception is Roy Lachica’s Fuzzzy.com where tags are structured in an ontology using Topic Maps).

The Semantic Web

The last couple of years / decade, people have been working towards a more “intelligent” web (although hardly intelligent); the semantic web. Such a web, often referred to as Web 3.0, adds the possibility of expressing semantics outside the limited domain of (X)HTML (or micro formats).

This is accomplished through adding layers of metadata to the web. The semantic web is therefore an extension (not replacement) of todays web, where different technologies, like Topic Maps and RDF/OWL, allow us to express anything about any subject - in a structured, explicit and unambiguous manner. I.e.: not limited to the element set of a given vocabular.

By doing so, one can (hopefully) bring order to the chaos, and develop better applications. Luckily, the technologies are already there, and by using Topic Maps one can e.g. boost findability.

For more on the semantic web or Topic Maps, see e.g.:

• Wikipedia - Semantic Web
  
• Wikipedia - Web 3.0
• TopicMap.com - Resources