[Sigia-l] Distributed thesaurus?

[Eric Scheid]

From: Lars Marius Garshol <larsga at garshol.priv.no> (22/9/02 10:58 PM)
>Of course, the problem here is that unless the parties merging topic
>maps have had prior communication so that they use the same subject
>identifiers their topic maps will not merge. There is an activity
>known as the "published subjects" activity which is working on this
>problem, essentially by leveraging existing code sets (ISO 3166, 639,
>15924, Ethnologue, UNSPSC, UN Locode, etc etc etc) to create large
>published subject sets with subject identifiers for all kinds of
>subjects.

At a pinch, one could simply use http://dictionary.com/search?q=word, 
right? At least, for those words without multiple meanings ;-)

>> Also, are there defined protocols for exchanging chunks of these
>> topicmap/thesaurus structures, or is it assumed that if I want to
>> examine your topic map I'll download the whole thing?
>
>Nobody expects you to do that, but on the other hand there is no
>standard "Remote Topic Protocol" at the moment. Various experiments
>have been done, but so far there is nothing really ready and tested.

I'd like to go even further away from full scale bulk merging ... 
spidering through connections, like as envisaged with the FOAF network. 
Although, what you've described above with published subjects means this 
won't really be possible, unless those canonical sources reflect back 
locations of the various topic maps that are subscribed to that 
definition ... which would be both unweildy, badly scaling, and too 
coarsely grained. Perhaps if a topic X in my TM included a reference to 
not only the canonical X, but also to other X's defined in other TMs.

If I had a topic map on the subject of (say) IA, in which I connect lots 
of IA subjects, some|many with the thesaurus terminology of BT/NT/RT ... 
does the syntax of connecting A->B support B existing elsewhere (ie. not 
in my topic map). This would be useful for both outwards and inwards 
scope management: I could connect my top level concepts to a broader 
web-design topic map elsewhere, and also connect bottom level concepts to 
elsewhere. Thus, if the really hard-headed nitty-gritty bamboozle-me 
maths involved in co-citation analysis is out of scope for my topic map, 
but I nonetheless refer to co-citation analysis as one way to improve 
search functionality, can I include a link to some other site that 
specialises in that subject?

It's that functionality that excites me.

e.

______________________________________________________________________
eric at ironclad.net.au                 i r o n c l a d   n e t w o r k s
information architect                      http://www.ironclad.net.au/