[Sigia-l] Topic maps and IA

[Jonas H ö glund]

This is a very good paper indeed. It will sure help me in my efforts of convincing my company in utilizing an ontology based approach for our content and knowledge management needs. We are in the process of developing yet an other CMS (we allready have quite many CMS's in differen parts of the organization). My vision is to build a CMIS instead, using something like TopicMap or OWL. A system where we can retrieve data from different systems and databases and in a meaningful way use it for external and internal communication needs, etc.

See:
CMIS: http://rockleybulletin.com/technologycorner_comments.php?id=5_0_6_0_C
TopicMap CMIS: http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/itms.html

Does anyone have any input to this? 
* Is it doable? 
* Is the technologies and the methods behind them developed enough? 
* Is there enough of skills and tools developed?
* Etc.

I also need to better understand the differences between OWL and TopicMap. So far, I've not been able to find any compare the two after that the OWL standard has been finished. Here are two links to papers comparing TopicMap to RDF, DAML, OIL and OWL. 

http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tmrdfoildaml.html
http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tmrdf.html

However, as I understands it,  DAML, OIL now has been added to the OWL standard, which in return is based on RDF. How does OWL and TopicMap compare today?

Lars, I've seen your answer to the same question dated 11 feb 2003. You said:

"It helps to first understand what OWL is. It's basically the
standardized successor of DAML+OIL, and is simply a constraint
language for RDF. So it plays the same role with respect to RDF that
XML Schema and DTDs do with respect to XML."

Is this still true? On the other hand, to be honest, I don't really know what this means to me. My concern is, can I do the same thing with RDF and OWL as I can with TopicMap, and vice verse. Does one of the languages have any extra features, capabilities or constrains to the other?

I'm very grateful for all the help and feedback that I might get!

Jonas Höglund