The Format

Unlike last years Topic Maps conference this year’s conference was not international, but Norwegian. It contained one Norwegian and one English track. In my opinion, this was all for the better. Where you last year could tell that some of the presenters were a bit uncomfortable with presenting their work in English, this year all the presentations were well presented.

I also enjoyed the contents of the individual presentations more this year, compared to previous years (2007/2008) — less of the same. And the food was also better

The Presentations

I’m not gonna walk through all presentations, but give an overview of the highlights (scope: trond).

The opening keynote made some interesting points regarding how reluctant people are towards sharing knowledge. As an example, the Norwegian Nasjonal Digital Læringsarena (NDLA) (“National Digital Learning Arena”) is producing  freely available digital learning resources for use in education – by teachers, pupils, parents, etc. These resources are meant to replace traditional books and I guess the thought behind it is that knowledge should be free to anyone within the society, and that sharing of knowledge is in the best interest of the society.

The book publishers (BIAA?), however, don’t like this idea and protest, claiming that the Norwegian government spend tax money on unfair competition. That an established business is protesting change is perhaps not all that shocking, but it was a bit funny to hear that the largest teacher union, Utdanningsforbundet, is also opposing the NDLA, advising their members not to share material produced for example for use in the classroom. I guess their objection is that if you spend an evening preparing for class, you do not want someone else to use your work. Why should others get for free what you spent your Sunday afternoon on? Tragically, this is how many people think … so they all spend their Sunday afternoons creating the same material.

Although the opening keynote didn’t have much to do with Topic Maps as such, it was an interesting presentation on a more philosophical level.

After the keynote Graham Moore of Networked Planet talked about how Topic Maps has been successful at the level of individual applications like CMSes (small scale) and information integration (enterprise, medium scale), but less so across the web (large scale). In his Vision for a Topic Maps World he presented an idea on how we can move away from Topic Maps enabled information silos and towards sharing of knowledge through re-using concepts across domains. One of the things he mentioned as a goal is more published subjects and Linked Open Topic Maps Data.

Moore emphasized a separation between identity addressing and identity in itself, and introduced a service called Subject Identity Resolution service. Networked Planet has created a SIR service which will go live on April 29 2009. Later this year they will be introducing additional services targeted not only towards machines, but towards human users searching for Subject Identity Records, for example. In relation to this, they have also launched a Web3 blog which you should of course add to your RSS reader.

Graham’s talk touched upon subjects that are of interst to many people within the Topic Maps community and you may also want to read Inge Henriksen’s thoughts on the subject as well as Robert Cerny’s JTM.

The CIO of FAST spoke about Topic Maps or Search? Another Religious War?. I didn’t find this talk too exciting apart from some insights into FAST’s thoughts on the next generation search- trying to use more semantics / create structure from unstructured sources – and search interfaces. Most of the examples were from site or application specific search engines. It didn’t really go into the level of details that I’d like to see, and my built-in antenna did pick up on some marketing vibes. The personal highlight of this talk was probably a PoC of an pretty cool search interface for a music web site in which you could drag and drop filters such as “80′s” or someone in your network (i.e. a user) into a search “box” which would then update the search results with 80′s music intersected with your friend’s music taste. You could also weigh the filters by scaling the icons or moving them around inside the box.

Bodil Kjelstrup from the University of Bergen (UiB) talked about the new www.uib.no in Tying Everything Together at UiB. It was a pretty interesting and well presented talk on the process behind the new web site of UiB, which is based on ZTM. Empasizing the communication aspects and the users of the site (i.e. not the researchers or the organization’s model of the world), they ended up with a rather limited ontology (leaving things out along the way) but are still able to build upon this for the future.

On a side note, I’ve started writing a post on how to get started with ZTM which will be published during the next couple of days.

In The Advantages of Model-Driven Search Stian Danenbarger talked about, well, how semantic models can be used in regards to search. He mentioned the faceted navigation used in search result interfaces such as on Government.no (more or less standard on all TM driven sites), but also different aspects of using model driven search, such as for example doing lookups and spreading a search from one subject to multiple subjects, possibility of weighing associations, etc., moving beyond the more traditional precicion/recall discussion but still trying to get the best result for the user. He also made a distinction between “mediated” and “analysis” driven search, and stated that model driven searches are probably only viable within domain specific applications.

There was perhaps not too much new here, as I had heard Stian talk about this subject before, but in this presentation he presented a more formal or theoretical model of the aspects of search and model driven search than I’d seen before. Probably one of the best presenations at TM 2009.

The closing plenary were given by Jon Bing who talked about Knowledge-Based Systems for Representing Legal Norms. Like the opening keynote this was also more of a philosophical discussion. It dealt with aspects such as ambiguity and the problem of formalizing context dependent knowledge. An entertaining closing of a very good conference.