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TMRA 2007

This year I was lucky enough to get to participate at the TMRA 2007 conference in Leipzig, Germany.

It was very interesting to hear some of the most prominent topic mappers giving talks on a range of interesting subjects, and promising to see that the community is getting there and that the missing standards work is not too far away.

I did also enjoy the tutorials on TMQL and CTM, and having done some work with XQuery in the past - at least enough to have experienced how powerful and easy to use it is, I really liked TMQL’s XQuery-like notation for simple expressions. For example, given a topic type identified by person, the expression:

//person / name

will return the names (String value) of all person instances in the topic map.
Obviously, this is much faster to write than tolog’s

select $nameStr from
instance-of($person, person),
topic-name($person, $name),
value($name, $nameStr)

There were also a lot of [ ^ < - > ] and <<-thingies, though…

CTM also looks very promising, and although I haven’t done much LTM, and barely looked at notations like AsTMa before, it is definitively good that a less verbose notation is close(r?) to being standardized.

Of the talks I went to, the highlights (personal, of course) was:

  • Lars Johnsen’s on Open Educational Topic Maps: A Text-oriented Perspective which made some good points regarding the role of Topic Maps in e-Learning environments and that “…the importance should be attached to the communicative aspects of such architectures…“. (This fits well into the CS for the humanities school that I come from).
  • Lars Marius’ talk on the (missing) theory of scope, which brought up some issues with the various definitions of scope in the standards documents (first came ISO 13250, then XTM 1.0 — followed by TMDM) — when does it apply / does it mean AND or OR? — and a belief() / disbelief() approach towards a theory of scope.
  • Roy Lachica’s Fuzzzy.com presentation and his talk on holistic knowledge creation and interchange the day after.
    Sure got some interesting tasks at hand there (everyone should start using Fuzzzy in order to support this work (note to self: “everyone” includes myself))…
  • Volker Stümpflen, Karamfilka Nenova, Thorsten Barnickel’s presentation Large Scale Knowledge Representation of Distributed Biomedical Information.Several petabytes of data on DNA, genes and protein structures represented in topic maps (fragments). Using TM as a tool for solving the problem: opened their session by asking how many were interested in TM and followed up by saying they were not - their job is dealing with biology systems.Claimed that TM was the right tool for the job — associate topics, presenting and navigating information and discovering new associations — it works. Do therefor advocate the use of this technology over e.g. RDF/OWL in the biology world.
  • Stian Danenbarger and Arnar Lundesgaard’s presentation of ZTM - a TMDM Management System for the Web.
    It will be interesting to see the new version of ZTM taking form (with its new features) and go “real” Open Source.

There were also some interesting presentations during the open space sessions.

LM presented a sort of intelligent natural language search demonstrating the strength of a Topic Maps approach, Morpheus Software has created a system for storing metadata about documents stored in Subversion in a topic map (SVN integrated with TM), Graham Moore mentioned some visions related to Web 3.0 (a semantic web (lower case “s”)) and topic maps, and
Dino Karaberg presented his knowledge = mountain theses, meaning that to keep generating and merging more and more information does not mean that we gain more knowledge (I think he’s absolutely right).

Lars Marius has done a good job of summarizing many of the talks from both Day 1 and Day 2.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 18:57 and is filed under Topic Maps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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