Topic Maps Update
Topic Maps Snippets
Some people at Bouvet, incl. Lars Marius Garshol and Arnar Lundesgaard, started a Topic Maps Snippets blog last year. It’s already a (the?) good source for news on Topic Maps.
TMRAP
Lars Marius Garshol wrote a post last week on how he has set up his tmphoto application to fetch remote information on topics using TMRAP. A good example on how PSIs can be used to exchange data about the same subject across different application domains, and an interesting read.
AToMs 2007 Slides
The presentations from AToMs have been made available online. Lots of intriguing stuff there.
For example, Steve Pepper seems to have been thinking a lot about converting the world to a subject-centric approach of computing lately.
I’m sure that, in a lot of ways, he’s right about how the human mind does not operate on documents, but subject-centric and associatively. At least that’s what my psychology classes told me, and most people experience on a daily basis: thinking of something might lead your thought wandering off to something completely different, but related (e.g. strawberries => milk, or even The Beatles (Strawberry Fields Forever)). When humans learn, we hook the new experiences onto existing knowledge.
Moving to a subject-centric way of computing and information management may be a good way of moving things forward, and, by nature, Topic Maps surely has its role in a subject-centric world. I’m sure we’ll hear more about it at Topic Maps 2008 (there’s also some more slides touching upon the topic).
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