[Sigia-l] Topic Maps integration

[Alexander Johannesen]

Hi Klas,

Klas Thorsén <klas at doberman.se> wrote:
> I hope that many of you can add interesting input, for example 
> Alexander... :)

Yeah, that's a sure way to make me answer, of course. :)

> What I am looking for is a wide range of examples and ideas of 
> how to implement Topic Maps on web sites. When I look around
> I almost only find the standard 'topic' headline with related links 
> that navigates the user to a search result collection page with a 
> wide range of subjects.

I think this is because most often you'll find very generalised
examples, known as Topic Map browser applications and the like. I'd
say that in the name of evangelisation, these are not always the best
examples because they are so general they're reaching the point of
irrelevant, at least for most people.

To plug shamelessly, have a look at my website; shelter.nu : Every
page is a topic of type #page, and many of them have relationships
that are Topic Maps based. My frontpage has only one, in the right
hand column, under the Flickr stuff, there is 'maintained by'. Now
this is all quite hidden.

Let's go to http://shelter.nu/tm.html ; here there are more relations,
like 'more under', 'see also', 'derived work', (all of these are
topics of type #page) and 'metadata' (occurrences in a topic, of type
#metadata). I can also attach occurrences of type #website to link
specifically to something, or maybe type #email for some contact email
address, and so forth.

So on that site, I use Topics for every page and blog entry, I use
Associations between all these pages (there's a few different
structures in the back, mostly tree-based, such as all the menues, but
also all the explicit relationships), and use Occurrence for various
other bits of data. Each Topic with a type #page has an occurrence of
type #page-content, which links to a content page. The rest is just
putting this all together.

My tool xSiteable is used for all this. I'm working on the next
generation of this tool these days, so if you're interested, my blog
will keep you up to date.

> What I hope to
> find is if there is more interesting ways to use it. Like for related
> content and other types of navigation implementation and not
> just a gross list. Can Topic Maps add smarter value for the user 
> in other ways?

If you're sufficent in Zope, then ZTM is a Topic Maps based version of
Zope in which I'm sure you can play more with this kind of thing.

Inherent with Topic Maps are two specific big hurdles; getting around
the concept (it's pretty much a general datamodel you can use to model
more specific datamodels, although there are other semantically
similar definitions), and finding the right tools. Some questions
always arise; how do you want to use TM? What technology will support
it? What are your real-time requirements? What are your technical
skill-levels? How big is your budget? How much time have you got? (I'd
add "Are you willing to learn?" but that would be a bit patronising,
so I'll refrain ... :)

Topic Maps are fantastic, once you get them and can do things with
them. Just 30 minutes before I left work yesterday I did a search for
my favourite composer 'Monteverdi' in a library search engine, saved
my result as MARC XML, dumped it into xSiteable (which has a MARC
ontology defined), and could right away surf around those books, find
names of people and stuff, where stuff were located, etc. But I know
the tools I'm using very well. Your milage may vary. And *that* is the
biggest problem with Toic Maps on the web today.

Anyway, feel free to ask some more. In the mean-time, here's some links ;

   http://www.topicmap.com/topicmap/resources.html


Regards,

Alex
-- 
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
                                                         - Frank Herbert
__ http://shelter.nu/ __________________________________________________