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Contents:
A topic map is a kind of index or information overlay which can be constructed separate from a set of resources, identifying instances of subjects and relationships within the set of resources. According to the XML Topic Maps (XTM) 1.0 TopicMaps.Org Specification, "The purpose of a topic map is to convey knowledge about resources through a superimposed layer, or map, of the resources. A topic map captures the subjects of which resources speak, and the relationships between subjects, in a way that is implementation-independent. The key concepts in topic maps are topics, associations, and occurrences. A topic is a resource within the computer that stands in for (or 'reifies') some real-world subject. Examples of such subjects might be the play Hamlet, the playwright William Shakespeare, or the 'authorship' relationship. Topics can have names. They can also have occurrences, that is, information resources that are considered to be relevant in some way to their subject. Finally, topics can participate in relationships, called associations, in which they play roles as members. Thus, topics have three kinds of characteristics: names, occurrences, and roles played as members of associations. The assignment of such characteristics is considered to be valid within a certain scope, or context. Topic maps can be merged. Merging can take place at the discretion of the user or application (at runtime), or may be indicated by the topic map's author at the time of its creation."
ISOTopicMaps.org. Home of SC34/WG3, Information Association. TopicMaps.Org Consortium Topic Navigation Maps - A collection of references from 1994-1999, still relevant for the most part as of 2000-06. [August 06, 2008] Information technology — Topic Maps — Constraint Language (TMCL). Text for ISO/IEC FCD 19756. Supersedes document SC 34 N668. Date: 2008-08-07. 40 pages. Copyright © ISO/IEC 2008. Issued by the JISC Secretariat, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 IPSJ/ITSCJ (Information Processing Society of Japan/Information Technology Standards Commission of Japan). ISO/IEC 19756 was prepared by Joint Technical Committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, Subcommittee SC 34, Document Description and Processing Languages. Posted by Toshiko KIMURA (IPSJ/ITSCJ). Not an ISO International Standard; distributed for review and comment. The specification makes use of the Topic Map Data Model namespace [%prefix tm] http://psi.topicmaps.org/tmdm/. See the reference page for ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 N1053: "In accordance with Resolution 6 adopted at the SC 34 Plenary meeting held in Kyoto, Japan, 2007-12-08/11 (SC 34 N 968), this document is circulated to the SC 34 members for a four-monthn FCD ballot. SC 34 members are requested to vote/comment via the CIB as soon as possible but not later than 2008-12-08.
"The TMCL specification defines a means to express and evaluate constraints on topic maps conforming to the Topic Map Data Model (TMDM). It defines a data model for representing constraints on instances of the topic map data model and the formal semantics for the interpretation of different constraint types. This International Standard expresses constraints using topic map constructs and the interpretation of these constraints as TMQL. In addition, This International Standard defines a number of CTM templates to faciliate the construction of TMCL constraints. TMCL constraints are represented as topic map structures using the TMDM. Any syntax that can be used to create TMDM structures is a valid authoring syntax for TMCL constraints and therefor no special syntax is defined. The formal semantics of TMCL constraints are defined using TMQL... TMCL defines constraint types and an interpretation for instances of those types. The interpretation indicates in an unambiguous fashion what it means for an instance of a given constraint type to be evaluated as true or false in the context of a TMDM instance. The TMCL constraint types are defined in terms of the topic map data model. The formal interpretation of each constraint type is defined using TMQL. All constraint types defined follow a common pattern. They are all defined as subtypes of the topic type called 'Constraint'. They all have an occurrence of type 'validation expression'. It is possible to define new constraint types that address specific domain requirements while still fitting into the overall TMCL validation framework. The constraint types defined in TMCL are intended for use in a entity constraint language fashion, such as ERM, UML etc. They are intended to be used to define the set of identities, occurrences, names and played association roles that a topic of a given type must have in order to been deemed valid e.g. topics of type person must have one unscoped name and be related to one other topic of type person who is their mother. The generalised constraint model, that of constraint and validation expression, is intended to facilitate map wide constraints that are not centered on one particular type. E.g. If a person works in department X then they must also be the author of at least 5 research papers..." [archive/cache] [May 21, 2008] [ISO] CD 13250-1, Information technology — Topic Maps — Part 1: Overview and Basic Concepts. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34. ISO/IEC 13250-1 was prepared by Joint Technical Committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information Technology, Subcommittee SC 34, Document Description and Processing Languages. See associated document with Reference number: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 N 1045.
"The topic maps standards enable users to answer two fundamental questions: (1) When are two or more speakers talking about the same subject? (subject identity); (2) How to gather all the information about a subject in one place? (co-location). Examples of where topic maps have been used include: [A] Navigational tools such as indexes, cross-references, citation systems, or glossaries for information systems; [B] Thesaurus-like interfaces to corpora, knowledge bases, etc. [C] Views of information systems that are filtered on the basis of language, security criteria, or any other useful basis [D] Providing unstructured information resources the appearance of structure for navigation or for use with other structured information resources [E] Providing context for subjects and relationships between subjects [where] context can be used to address the polysemy problem faced by WWW search engines.
In order to have interchangeable answers to the questions of subject identity and co-location, the topic maps standards specify an XML syntax and processing model that standardizes a representations of subjects (topics), relationships between subjects (associations) and information about those subjects (occurrences). Beyond the basic syntax and data model, alternative representations (syntaxes) are also defined along with query and constraint languages. Every choice of how to identify a subject and the basis for co-location of necessity excludes other, equally valid choices to answer those questions. To enable the future development of other interchangeable answers to those questions, a model with minimal ontological commitments that specifies a path language for the query and contraint language is also defined. Topic maps, at their best, represent a user's knowledge of a domain. As such, they can capture human judgments about the identity of subjects, relationships between subjects, as well as other nuances that escape the notice of non-human systems..." [July 17, 2008] Topic Maps Query Language. ISO/IEC FCD 18048, Information technology — Topic Maps — Query Language (TMQL). By Lars Marius Garshol and Robert Barta (project editors). 2008-07-15. 51 pages. Memo to P, O and L members of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34. "In accordance with Resolution 6 adopted at the SC 34 Plenary meeting held in Kyoto, Japan, 2007-12-08/11 (SC 34 N 968), this document is circulated to the SC 34 members for an FCD ballot for a four-month period. P-members of SC 34 are requested to vote via the CIB as soon as possible but not later than 2008-11-17." An announcement issued by Toshiko Kimura for the Secretariat of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 (IPSJ/ITSCJ - Information Processing Society of Japan/Information Technology Standards Commission of Japan) reports on the public release of the FCD Ballot text for Topic Maps Query Language [TMQL]. ISO/IEC 18048 was prepared by Joint Technical Committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information Technology, Subcommittee SC 34, Document Description and Processing Languages. "This [FCD] International Standard defines a query language for Topic Maps known as TMQL (Topic Maps Query Language). The draft was informed by 'Topic Map Query Language, Use Cases' and 'TMQL Requirements', and is submitted for review for interested parties... The document defines a formal language for accessing information organized according to the Topic Maps paradigm. This document specifies syntactic rules to form valid query expressions to extract information from a Topic Maps instance and also provides an informal and a formal semantics for every syntactic form. To constrain the interaction and information flow between a querying application and a TMQL query processor (short: processor) this International Standard also describes an abstract processing environment, loosely defines the passing of parameters into the query process and the exchange of result values. This environment also includes a minimal, predefined set of functions and operators every conformant processor must provide. This International Standard does not define an API (application programming interface) to interact with query processors and also refrains from naming certain error conditions. It also remains silent on other implementation issues, such as optimization or error recovery..." [cache] [May 21, 2008] Topic Maps Reference Model. 13250-5 FCD. [Topic Maps — Reference Model — ISO 13250-5.] Edited by Patrick Durusau,
Steve Newcomb, and Robert Barta. May 16, 2008. 17 pages. Announcement posted 2008-05-20 by Toshiko Kimura. 'Circulated to P- and O-members, and to technical committees and organizations in liaison... please vote and comment via the CIB on the ISO/TC server by 2008-09-19.' Source: Project editor: Mr. Robert BARTA, Dr. Patrick DURUSAU, Dr. Steven R. NEWCOMB. Project: JTC 1.34.13250-5 Status: In accordance with Resolution 6 of the SC 34 plenary meeting held in Kyoto, Japan, 2007-12-08/11, this text is circulated to the SC 34 members for FCD ballot. SC 34 members are requested to vote and comment via the CIB on the ISO/TC server by the due date.
From the Introduction: "The Topic Maps family of standards is designed to facilitate the gathering of all the information about a subject at a single location. The information about a subject includes its relationships to other subjects; such relationships may also be treated as subjects (subject-centric). ISO/IEC 13250-2 (TMDM, Topic Maps Data Model) provides a foundation for syntaxes and notations, such as those defined in ISO/IEC 13250-3 Topic Maps XML Syntax and ISO/IEC 13250-4 Topic Maps Canonicalization. Of necessity, the TMDM makes ontological commitments in terms of how particular subjects are identified (topics, associations, occurrences), what properties are required, the tests to be used to determine whether two or more proxies represent the same subject, and other matters. This Standard defines TMRM (Topic Maps Reference Model), which is more abstract and has fewer ontological commitments. Its purpose is to serve as a minimal, conceptual foundation for subject-centric data models such as the TMDM, and to supply ontologically neutral terminology for disclosing these. It defines what is required to enable the mapping of different subject-centric data models together to meet the overall goal of the Topic Maps standards, that each subject has a single location for all the information about it. TMRM also provides a formal foundation for related Topic Maps standards such as ISO/IEC 18048 Topic Maps Query Language (TMQL) and ISO/IEC 19756 Topic Maps Constraint Language (TMCL)."
See the associated document with Reference ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 N 1043 (supersedes document N939): Text for FCD 13250-5, Information technology -- Document Description and Processing Languages -- Topic Maps -- Part 5: Reference Model. Its Introductory note: "The NWI ballot was conducted as N358 and its Summary of voting was circulated as N388. The CD ballot was conducted as N594 and its summary of voting is contained in N618. The disposition of comments was held during the WG 3 meeting in Amsterdam, and its meeting notes is contained in N643. The second CD ballot was conducted as N710 and its summary of voting is contained in N739. The disposition of comments is contained in N769. The revised CD texts were circulated as N879, N886 and N939, In accordance with Resolution 6 of the SC 34 plenary meeting held in Kyoto, Japan, 2007-12-08/11, this text is circulated to the SC 34 members for FCD ballot. SC 34 members are requested to vote and comment via the CIB on the ISO/TC server by the due date." [canonical source] [May 23, 2006] "Towards the Semantic Superhighway: A Manifesto for Published Subjects." By Steve Pepper (Ontopia; Oslo, NORWAY). Presented at the Workshop "Identity, Reference, and the Web: Architecture and Philosophy of the Web" (Edinburgh, Scotland; May 23, 2006). Co-Chairs Pat Hayes (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition), Harry Halpin (University of Edinburgh), and Henry S. Thompson (World Wide Web Consortium and University of Edinburgh). Wiki page. See also the presentation slides [cache]. "This paper describes the need for a simple mechanism for defining and assigning unique global identifiers for arbitrary subjects on the World Wide Web in order to solve the problem of information overload. It presents the case for Published Subjects and published subject indicators (PSIs) being the best solution to this problem, and briefly characterizes the strengths and weaknesses of alternative approaches. It ends with a call to action... The basic principles of PSIs are thus extremely simple: A PSI is simply a URL that is defined (and published) for the express purpose of serving as an identifier and that resolves to a document that in some way describes or 'indicates' the subject that it identifies. The first major advantage of PSIs is that the concept is easy to explain. In addition, PSIs extend current practice rather than promote an entirely new paradigm: URLs are already well understood as identifiers for documents, and they have been used as identifiers for arbitrary subjects in a number of communities (including those of the Semantic Web and Topic Maps) for several years. This means that there already exists a very large number of identifiers that are URLs. All that needs to be done in order to turn these into PSIs is to create subject indicators to which they resolve. In many cases this can be done automatically, using existing information resources, such as definitions. Furthermore, existing systems of (non-global) identifiers can easily (often authomatically) be turned into PSIs by prefixing an existing alpha or numeric code with a namespace URI based on an internet domain and an (optional) subject domain component..." [source] [August 13, 2005] "Untangle Your Information: Four Steps to Integrating Knowledge with Topic Maps." Technical White Paper. Prepared by Innodata Isogen. August 10, 2005. 12 pages. "For years, organizations have sought to improve the way they share information and knowledge with employees, partners and customers. But the platforms that exist to deliver such content — Web sites and corporate databases — are not designed to support or facilitate an integrated knowledge management strategy. As a result, this goal has remained somewhat elusive for many organizations. Moreover, many companies have yet to fully resolve the challenge of integrating data and knowledge from disparate software systems, although the adoption of standards has made it easier to combine content from different platforms and software applications. For example: (1) Network standards have solved the physical issues of connecting different computing systems. (2) Internet protocol standards have made the integration of disparate platforms transparent and seamless. (3) Web standards have allowed information to be shared among people using a wide variety of tools. XML, for example, has made large amounts of data accessible to a variety of systems. But when large volumes of data become more accessible, the process invariably runs into the problem of how to convey knowledge about the content and the interrelationships between its individual elements. New knowledge-sharing standards, such as topic maps, address this challenge and are now emerging as a viable approach for organizations seeking to find a better way to share, interpret and respond to the wealth of information now available. By allowing enterprises to represent the knowledge stored in a wide variety of applications, topic maps not only enable different applications to share information, but also the intrinsic metadata describing that information. In this paper, we will examine these challenges, detail four steps for implementing topic maps and examine several real-world applications: [1] Locate the sources of knowledge within your organization; [2] Capture critical knowledge, then evolve and refine the model; [3] Integrate knowledge-driven applications with topic maps; [4] Migrate legacy data into the knowledge base..." See also the webinar series associated with this White Paper, presented by Dan Dube and Chris Hill (September 7, 2005). Also: "Exploiting Topic Maps as a Corporate Knowledge Model" (Co-presented by Innodata Isogen and Ontopia; September 14, 2005) and "Best Practices in Topic Map Applications for European Government" (Co-presented by Innodata Isogen and TEMIS, September 21, 2005). [May 24, 2005] "An OWL DL Construction for the ISO Topic Map Data Model." By Anne Cregan (Artificial Intelligence Group, School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales Australia). Amsterdam Conference Paper. "Both Topic Maps and the W3C Semantic Web technologies are meta-level semantic maps describing relationships between information resources. Previous attempts at interoperability between XTM Topic Maps and RDF have proved problematic. The ISO's drafting of an explicit Topic Map Data Model combined with the advent of the W3C's XML and RDFbased Description Logic-equivalent Web Ontology Language now provides the means for the construction of an unambiguous semantic model to represent Topic Maps, in a form that is equivalent to a Description Logic representation. This paper describes the construction of the proposed TMDM ISO Topic Map Standard in OWL DL (Description Logic equivalent) form. The construction is claimed to exactly match the features of the proposed TMDM. The intention is that the topic map constructs described herein, once officially published on the world-wide web, may be used by Topic Map authors to construct their Topic Maps in OWL DL. The advantage of OWL DL Topic Map construction over XTM, the existing XML-based DTD standard, is that OWL DL allows many constraints to be explicitly stated. OWL DL's suite of tools, although currently still somewhat immature, will provide the means for both querying and enforcing constraints. This goes a long way towards fulfilling the requirements for a Topic Map Query Language (TMQL) and Constraint Language (TMCL), which the Topic Map Community may choose to expend effort on extending. Additionally, OWL DL has a clearly defined formal semantics..." [source .PDF] [March 29, 2005] W3C Releases Survey of RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability Proposals Working Draft. An initial public working draft from the W3C RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability Task Force (RDFTM) presents A Survey of RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability Proposals. This specification, initiated by the W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group (SWBPD) with the support of the ISO Topic Maps Committee (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34), is part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity. The document "contains a survey of existing proposals for integrating RDF and Topic Maps data and is intended to be a starting point for establishing standard guidelines for RDF/Topic Maps interoperability." The W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a model developed by the W3C for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web. Topic Maps, a project of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34, is a standard for knowledge [representation and] integration, developed by ISO. The primary goal of this W3C endeavor is to "achieve interoperability between RDF and Topic Maps at the data level. This means that it should be possible to translate data from one form to the other without unacceptable loss of information or corruption of the semantics. It should also be possible to query the results of a translation in terms of the target model and it should be possible to share vocabularies across the two paradigms." According to the Background statement for the Working Draft, the RDF and Topic Maps specifications "were developed in parallel during the late 1990's within their separate organizations for what at first appeared to be very different purposes. The results, however, turned out to have a lot in common and this has led to calls for their unification." While unification of RDF and Topic Maps has to date "not been possible, for a variety of technical and political reasons, a number of attempts have been made to uncover the synergies between RDF and Topic Maps and to find ways of achieving interoperability at the data level. There is now widespread recognition within the respective user communities that achieving such interoperability is a matter of some urgency. Work has therefore been initiated by the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group of the W3C with the support of the ISO Topic Maps committee to address this issue." This Working Draft "consists of a summary and analysis of the major existing proposals for achieving data interoperability between RDF and Topic Maps. RDF-Schema and OWL are considered relevant to this work to the extent that the classes and properties they define are supportive of its goals. However, it is explicity not a goal of the current work to enable the general use of RDF Schema and OWL with Topic Maps, although this issue may be addressed later. [February 02, 2005] "An Introduction to TMAPI." By Robert Barta and Oliver Leimig. From XML.com (February 02, 2005). "There are several software packages for Java developers when they need to develop applications using XML Topic Maps. There are some proprietary software vendors and also open source packages like TM4j, tinyTIM, and a few others. In the Java tradition to standardize interfaces, the TMAPI project has proposed a set of Java interfaces which particular Topic Map implementations may choose to adhere to. The obvious advantage for the application developer is to use only that single set of interfaces and to choose a particular implementation on other merits. There is a strong coherence between TMAPI and the class model behind TMDM, the TM data model. This, of course, is no coincidence: both have been developed in lock-step. The result is that Java developers are programming close to the (high-level) TM model. This article gives a fast-lane introduction to creating and restoring information using TMAPI. This tutorial is a spin-off of our efforts to create a TMAPI-compliant AsTMa parser; we have no affiliation with the TMAPI project itself... Java developers will find the interface simple enough to be used right away, as was the case for our project. TMAPI covers the building of Topic Map structures in memory and offers also means to navigate through such a structure in a standardized way. Other features like transaction management, application-controlled merging (when and how), or persistency issues (how and where a topic map is stored) are outside the TMAPI scope and have to be dealt with by particular implementations. Also not part of TMAPI (yet) is a high-level query language. This may change once TMQL is finished..." General references in: "(XML) Topic Maps." [April 09, 2004] TMAPI 1.0 Alpha Release: Common Topic Map Application Programming Interface. A first major public release of TMAPI has been made available from the project's SourceForge website. TMAPI is a "proposed programming interface for accessing and manipulating data held in a topic map. The TMAPI specification defines a set of core interfaces which must be implemented by a compliant application as well as a set of additional interfaces which may be implemented by a compliant application or which may be built upon the core interfaces." According to the project announcement of April 8, 2004, the goal of TMAPI is "to allow developers to learn and use just one programming API for work with any topic map processing engine — improving code portability and reducing learning curve. TMAPI has been developed in an open process by developers working on topic map processors and topic map applications, and has been placed into the public domain; there are no restrictions on its use." Motivation for the TMAPI development effort is provided on the project home page: "[Though] commercial and non-commercial topic map processing applications are available, each of these applications has a different programming interface, reflecting the slightly different ideas that each developer has had about the best way to represent the information in a topic map. For an application developer, this leads to non-portable code; the need to learn a new API for every topic map implementation he or she uses and the lack of a community of supporting developers. TMAPI hopes to do for topic maps what SAX and DOM did for XML: provide a single common API which all developers can code to and which means that their applications can be moved from one underlying platform to another with minimum fuss." [April 09, 2004] "Response to N0497 'Analysis of RM Use Cases'." By Steven R. Newcomb and Patrick Durusau. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, N0498. Project: WD 13250-5: Information Technology - Document Description and Processing Languages, Topic Maps - Reference Model. Informational. "The Pepper/Garshol reading of the TMRM (Topic Maps Reference Model) use cases as procedural questions, rather than as examples of situations requiring declarative disclosures, highlights the insufficiency of the TMDM (Topic Maps Data Model) and its related syntax/procedure based components in addressing the central unanswered question in Topic Maps. That central unanswered question is: How does a topic map declares its approach to the problem of reflecting the "territory" of which it is a "map"? More specifically: How does a topic map declare exactly how its topics identify their subjects? No topic maps standard has yet been adopted that provides any generalized means for specifying arbitrary bases for the recognition of subject identity. This omission has been masked by the Topic Maps community's invention, on an ad hoc, basis, of whatever approaches were needed for subject identity recognition, and its use of such ad hoc approaches to inform the designs of any subject-oriented processes that are implemented in their software...In the absence of clear guidance from the adopted standards, the ad hoc approach that the community took was appropriate, reasonable, necessary, wise, and helpful to the cause of Topic Maps. But these historical facts do not make the omission of a standard way to disclose the basis for subject identity from the revision of ISO 13250 a virtue, nor do they make a virtue of allowing XTM, TMDM, TMCL, and TMQL to fail to provide for disclosing subject identity. It is in the best interests of the topic maps community and our users that these omissions be corrected in any future edition of 13250..." [April 07, 2004] "Analysis of TMRM Use Cases." By Steve Pepper and Lars Marius Garshol. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, N0497. Project: WD 13250-5: Information Technology — Document Description and Processing Languages, Topic Maps — Reference Mode. Informational. "In N423 (Recommendations of May 2003 Meeting of WG3) the editors of the Topic Maps Reference Model (TMRM) were instructed to prepare a user requirements document for the TMRM. The goal was to enable WG3 to arrive at a common understanding of the purpose of the TMRM, in order to better assess the relevance and value of the drafts of the TMRM that have so far been presented. N490 (Topic Maps — Reference Model Use Cases) is the editors' response. This document is a very valuable contribution to the discussion and we thank the authors for the effort that they have put into it. Now that the editors of the TMRM have described the kinds of business problems that the TMRM is intended to address, it becomes much easier to evaluate the need for such a reference model and determine the extent to which the current draft of the TMRM (N460) meets that need. Our first reaction upon reading N490 was that it did not appear to contain any requirements that could not be met by the Topic Maps Data Model and a query language such as TMQL (Topic Maps Query Language, ISO 18048). If that is the case, then N490 in and of itself cannot be regarded as justification for the TMRM: The purpose of a Use Cases document is to identify User Requirements that justify the development of a new standard. If the User Requirements revealed by the Use Cases can already be met by existing or planned standards, there is no justification for a new standard. This paper was written in order to test our initial hypothesis by evaluating each use case in N490 in order to determine whether or not it can be satisfied using existing or planned standards (i.e., the TMDM, TMQL and/or TMCL). It does not attempt to assess the extent to which the current draft of the TMRM meets the requirements identified through the use cases in N490..." [March 24, 2004] "Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! Making Sense Of It All." By Lars Marius Garshol (Development Manager, Ontopia). March 24, 2004. Ontopia Technical Report. "To be faced with a document collection and not to be able to find the information you know exists somewhere within it is a problem as old as the existence of document collections. Information Architecture is the discipline dealing with the modern version of this problem: how to organize web sites so that users actually can find what they are looking for. Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions, and that is the question this paper attempts to address. The paper argues that topic maps go beyond the traditional solutions in the sense that it provides a framework within which they can be represented as they are, but also extended in ways which significantly improve information retrieval... this paper tries to show that topic maps provide a common reference model that can be used to explain how to understand many common techniques from library science and information architecture. It also shows how these techniques can be implemented using topic maps, and how topic maps can go far beyond the possibilities provided by traditional techniques. By using topic maps to represent metadata and subject-based classification it is possible to reuse existing classifications and classification techniques, while at the same time describing the world more precisely where desired..." [March 20, 2004] "Topic Maps — Reference Model Use Cases." Version 2.7, 2004-03-20. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, N0490. Edited by Patrick Durusau and Steven R. Newcomb. Informational. Project: WD 13250-5: Information Technology — Topic Maps — Reference Model. "The following use cases have been developed to guide the discussion of requirements for the Topic Maps Reference Model (TMRM). There has been extensive work on and discussion of the both topic maps and TMRM and this document is written against that background... Currently ISO 13250 provides no abstract model of topic maps. The situation is analogous to the path not taken in the early development of airplanes. Without the underlying model that guided the design of the Wrights' airplane, others could copy their work, making airplanes that, like the Wright's flyer, would really fly — but only for a few hundred meters. The development of airplanes for diverse practical purposes required a general model of the dynamics of powered flight — one that could form a basis on which many problems could have many creative solutions. Similarly, the first interchange syntaxes and processing models for topic maps have guided the construction of topic maps that really work. However, by themselves, these syntaxes and processing models provide an inadequate basis for creating and using diverse solutions to the evolving problems confronted by those who create, manage and use human knowledge. The existing interchange syntaxes and processing models for topic maps reflect particular approaches to the identification of subjects — specific techniques for determining when two or more topics represent the same subject. Both ISO 13250 and the proposed revisions of it concede that their interchange syntaxes and processing models can be extended, but they provide no guidance for modeling or meaningfully disclosing those extensions, such that meaningful construction and interchange of such topic maps are possible. In the absence of an abstract model for topic maps, it is not possible for vendors and users to extend current syntaxes and processing models in a reliable and interchangeable way... The TMRM exposes principles on the basis of which diverse designs for topic maps can be expressed, compared, evaluated, and made to work together. This document describes some use cases in which the TMRM is expected to enable solutions to problems that, in the absence of the TMRM, would be more difficult to solve..." [December 05, 2003] "Web Editor Framework Out of Beta. Ontopia Announces Ontopia Knowledge Suite Release 2.0." - "Ontopia AS, the world's leading vendor of topic map technology, announced Release 2.0 of the Ontopia Knowledge Suite, which will be available from 19 December 2003. This major release of the OKS brings: (1) the full release of the Web Editor Framework for building custom topic map authoring environments; (2) extension of the query language to cover tasks that had required either API programming or use of the Navigator Framework tag libraries, new built-in predicates now allow querying all parts of a topic map; (3) support for import and export of RDF data to topic maps; (4) the popular free-download, Omnigator, now includes support for hierarchy visualization... Steve Pepper, Founder of Ontopia, says 'Now, finally, the Topic Maps community has a real, powerful, flexible tool for editing Topic Maps. Implementations in Norway and the UK are already using the Web Editor Framework to create custom editing environments.' The OKS uses the powerful Topic Maps model to enable the rapid development of complex systems. Using the OKS, integrators can create representations of diverse information and knowledge models, and then access and manipulate them with a common tool set and query language. 'I am really pleased with the new RDF support in OKS 2.0 and Omnigator VII because it finally bridges the gap between these two closely related knowledge technologies, enabling users to easily move data back and forth between topic maps and RDF,' remarked Lars Marius Garshol, Development Manager. 'The most important aspect of the approach we've taken is that it allows users to use the same vocabularies with both RDF and topic maps.' The OKS, a Java toolkit for applying Topic Maps functionality, consists of a topic map engine with scalable API, J2EE-compliant toolkits for development of editing and browsing applications, full-text search, schema tools, persistent and scalable storage of topic maps in an RDBMS..." [December 04, 2003] Topic Map Query Language, Use Cases. By Lars Marius Garshol (Ontopia) and Robert Barta (Bond University). Technical document 2003-12-04. Editors' Draft, TMQL Use Cases. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 — Information Technology — Document Description and Processing Languages This document is part of the effort to define a standard query language for Topic Maps (TMQL, ISO 18048) and as such describes possible use scenarios from both, an application oriented view, but also more detailed in terms of retrieved topic map content. These use cases are intended to support the evaluation process for individual TMQL proposals... Topic maps have a particular structure as defined by "Topic Map Data Model" (former Standard Application Model, SAM), and more abstractedly by "The Topic Maps Reference Model". In principle it would be possible (and it has been done) to model the content via a relational data model or (using "XML Topic Maps (XTM) 1.0 Specification" as one possible representation) storing it into an XML (enabled) data store. For scalability reasons most TM storage solutions tend to build their own dedicated data models and access technologies. From this point on programming interfaces allow application developers to access part of the map, being for reading or writing. In this sense the abstract model defined by TMDM may play a similar role as DOM for XML based data, at least in the short term. For reasons of minimality, data models such as TMDM have to be limited in the way how particular TM content is identified in a map. A Topic Map Query Language may cut down development costs for particular classes of applications. The language would allow to phrase more global queries viewing the topic map content as a whole and not just as a collection of topics and associations. Additionally such a language could also facilitate the generation of output in formats like XML directly in order to minimize the necessary interaction between the application and the query infrastructure. The following application scenarios and use cases are designed to illustrate the use of a hyperthetical Topic Map query language. They all assume that TM content is stored in an appropriate backend and is retrieved using the query language in a similar way how "SQL: The Standard and the Language" is used for relational data stores. It is also assumed that TMQL can generate output in form of list structures, tree-structured like XML or even complete topic maps..." [source] [December 01, 2003] ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 Publishes Topic Map Query Language (TMQL) Requirements. A posting from Lars Marius Garshol announces the publication of a new draft version of TMQL Requirements, defining informal requirements and feature lists for the upcoming ISO standard TMQL (Topic Map Query Language, ISO/IEC 18048). This language "is intended to be a kind of SQL (or XML Query) for topic maps, and will greatly simplify topic map application development by making it much easier to extract information from topic maps." TMQL is being developed by SC34 in connection with TMCL (ISO 19756: Topic Maps Constraint Language) and the multi-part standard ISO/IEC 13250: Topic Maps. This updated TMQL Version 1.2.0 draft supersedes the August 2003 draft version 1.0.0. ISO/IEC 13250-2 (Topic Maps Data Model) defines the abstract structure of topic maps and provides the foundation for TMQL. The revised TMQL requirements draft "reflects the intentions of the Topic Map community regarding a Topic Map retrieval and manipulation language, and contains the consolidated view of the standards editors. It defines the requirements for the TMQL standard as a whole, and for the query aspect of TMQL in particular; additional requirements for the update part of TMQL will be detailed at a later stage." SC34/WG3 ('Information Association') will be meeting for standards work December 6-8, 2003 in Philadelphia, PA, USA. Special attention is being given to the Topic Map specifications, including the ISO 13250 Roadmap and Primer, XTM (XTM Syntax and Specification), TMDM ( Topic Map Data Model), TMCL, Canonical XTM, TMQL, and the Topic Map Reference Model. [November 07, 2003] TMQL Requirements. By Lars Marius Garshol (Ontopia) and Robert Barta (Bond University). ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 N0448. Project: ISO 13250. Project editors: Steven R. Newcomb, Michel Biezunski, and Martin Bryan. TMQL Requirements 1.2.0, Draft '07 11 2003' [viz., 2003-11-07] "This document provides informal requirements and feature lists for the upcoming ISO standard TMQL (Topic Map Query Language, ISO/IEC 18048). It reflects the intentions of the Topic Map community regarding a Topic Map retrieval and manipulation language and contains the consolidated view of the standards editors. Herein are defined the requirements for the TMQL standard as a whole, and for the query aspect of TMQL in particular. Additional requirements for the update part of TMQL will be detailed at a later stage. The purpose of this document is to be as explicit as possible about the form and functionality of a Topic Map query language without preempting the discussion process on how particular objectives, goals, and requirements can be achieved. This is regarded as the most effective way to solicit more specific comments from the community. While striving for a maximum of expliciteness, some of the requirements are only implicitly specified through other requirements. In this light the document should not be read as a fully formalized requirements document. Instead, feedback on this document is requested, especially as the targeted lifetime of TMQL related technologies is projected to be at least 15 to 20 years. This document is organized as follows. After some editorial definitions we will define some basic concepts for querying which we will use throughout the rest of the document. These set the stage for requirements of the standardization document and on requirements regarding the language itself." [source] [July 01, 2003] The OASIS Published Subjects Technical Committee was chartered in September 2001 under the name "OASIS Topic Maps Published Subjects Technical Committee" to advance ISO 13250 [ISO/IEC 13250 - Topic Maps] for organizing, retrieving and navigating information resources by specifying recommendations, requirements and best practices for published subjects. See "TopicMaps.Org Consortium Continues Development Efforts within OASIS." The TC name was changed to "OASIS Published Subjects Technical Committee" in October 2004. Examples from the official web site ['psi.oasis-open.org'] are (1) Published subjects for languages in ISO 639 and (2) Published subjects for countries in ISO 3166.
The TC produced a "Committee Specification" version of Published Subjects: Introduction and Basic Requirements OASIS Published Subjects Technical Committee Recommendation, 2003-06-24 [source]:
"Published Subjects as defined in this Specification provide an open, scaleable, URI-based method of identifying subjects of discourse. They cater for the needs of both humans and applications, and they provide mechanisms for ensuring confidence and trust on the part of users. Published Subjects are therefore expected to be of particular interest to publishers and users of ontologies, taxonomies, classifications, thesauri, registries, catalogues, and directories, and for applications (including agents) that capture, collate or aggregate information and knowledge.
A subject can be an individual, like Isaac Newton, the apple that fell on his head, or a document (such as this one). It may be a class of individuals, like scientists, fruits, or OASIS specifications. It may also be a more abstract concept like gravity or inevitability. In short, a subject can be any subject of discourse that an author wishes to identify, name, represent, or otherwise make assertions about.
TC members also produced a proposed DTD [source]. See the note on Vocabulary Management. [Note: the TC was closed in November 2006.] [March 26, 2003] "Topic Maps Model (TMM)." By Steven R. Newcomb, Sam Hunting, Jan Algermissen, and Patrick Durusau. Produced for ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 Information Technology -- Document Description and Processing Languages. March 28, 2003. Editor's Draft, Revision 2.30. Reference: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 N0393. "This International Standard specifies: the information structure of all topic maps; certain common properties of topics, and constraints on the values of those properties; constraints on the definitions of Topic Map Applications; the definition of the term 'fully merged' as it applies to topic maps; and other definitions and specifications that support the foregoing... Topic maps are bodies of information that consist of 'topics', each of which is a surrogate for a single subject. If every topic in a topic map is the only surrogate for its subject, then users can find all information about that subject in a single location. The Topic Maps Model -- the information structure of all topic maps that is defined by this International Standard -- constrains the definitions of Topic Maps Applications in order to enable the achievement of this 'Subject Location Uniqueness Objective [SLUO]'. It specifies a foundation for lossless and uniform treatment of heterogeneous topic map information. The Topic Maps Model meets the following requirements: (1) It enables an unbounded number of different Topic Map Applications to be created and used. (2) It enables metrics to be developed for arbitrary sets of Topic Map Applications. (3) It enables Topic Map Applications to be expressed as topic maps. (4) It enables the conformance of Topic Map Applications to this International Standard to be verified. (5) It enables rigorous specification and auditing of the process whereby an interchangeable topic map is understood as a set of subjects. It enables specification of conventions for referring to members of that set of subjects by referring to components of interchangeable topic maps. (6) It enables determination of whether two topic maps are identical. (7) It facilitates the specification and determination of subject identity by humans, as well as machines. (8) When two or more topic maps are merged automatically, the Topic Maps Model [1] enables the merging process to be consistent across Topic Map Applications and their implementations, and [2] preserves the integrity of the information contained in the merged topic maps in the resulting single topic map..." See also the previous version (1.0). ISO/IEC 13250 Topic Maps. Information Technology, Document Description and Processing Languages. Technologies de l'information -- Cartes topiques. [13250 - First. December 3, 1999. E.] "International Standard ISO/IEC 13250 was prepared by Joint Technical Committee 1 JTC1, Information technology, Subcommittee SC34, Document description and processing languages. Introduction: This International Standard provides a standardized notation for interchangeably representing information about the structure of information resources used to define topics, and the relationships between topics. A set of one or more interrelated documents that employs the notation defined by this International Standard is called a topic map. In general, the structural information conveyed by topic maps includes: (1) groupings of addressable information objects around topics ('occurrences'), and (2) relationships between topics ('associations'). A topic map defines a multidimensional topic space -- a space in which the locations are topics, and in which the distances between topics are measurable in terms of the number of intervening topics which must be visited in order to get from one topic to another, and the kinds of relationships that define the path from one topic to another, if any, through the intervening topics, if any. [NOTE: Two topics may be connected through an association, and they can also be connected by virtue of sharing an occurrence.] In addition, information objects can have properties, as well as values for those properties, assigned to them externally. These properties are called facet types. [NOTE: The word facet can mean one side of a many-sided, polished object, or one segment of a compound eye (e.g., an insect's). Its metaphorical use here captures the idea that a facet is a property of a set of information objects that can be used to create a view of them.] Several topic maps can provide topical structure information about the same information resources. The Topic Maps architecture is designed to facilitate merging topic maps without requiring the merged topic maps to be copied or modified. Because of their extrinsic character, topic maps can be thought of as overlays on, or extensions to, sets of information objects. The base notation of Topic Maps is SGML; an interchangeable topic map always consists of at least one SGML document, and it may include and/or refer to other kinds information resources. A set of information resources that comprise a complete interchangeable topic map can be specified using the 'bounded object set (BOS)' facility defined by the HyTime architecture in ISO/IEC 10744:1997. As the Extensible Markup Language (XML), a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation, is a subset of SGML, as explained in Annex K of SGML (1997), also known as WebSGML, XML can be also used as a base notation for Topic Maps. The topic map notation is defined as an SGML Architecture, and this International Standard takes the form of an architecture definition document expressed in conformance with Normative Annex A.3 of ISO/IEC 10744:1997, the SGML Architectural Form Definition Requirements (AFDR). The formal definition of the topic map notation is expressed as a meta-DTD." Scope: "Topic maps enable multiple, concurrent views of sets of information objects. The structural nature of these views is unconstrained; they may reflect an object oriented approach, or they may be relational, hierarchical, ordered, unordered, or any combination of the foregoing. Moreover, an unlimited number of topic maps may be overlaid on a given set of information resources. Topic maps can be used: (1) To qualify the content and/or data contained in information objects as topics to enable navigational tools such as indexes, cross-references, citation systems, or glossaries. (2) To link topics together in such a way as to enable navigation between them. This capability can be used for virtual document assembly, and for creating thesaurus-like interfaces to corpora, knowledge bases, etc. (3) To filter an information set to create views adapted to specific users or purposes. For example, such filtering can aid in the management of multilingual documents, management of access modes depending on security criteria, delivery of partial views depending on user profiles and/ or knowledge domains, etc. (4) To structure unstructured information objects, or to facilitate the creation of topic-oriented user interfaces that provide the effect of merging unstructured information bases with structured ones. The overlay mechanism of topic maps can be considered as a kind of external markup mechanism, in the sense that an arbitrary structure is imposed on the information without altering its original form. This International Standard does not require or disallow the use of any scheme for addressing information objects. Except for the requirement that topic map documents themselves be expressed using SGML (or WebSGML) and HyTime, using the syntax described herein, neither does it require or disallow the use of any notation used to express information." [cache] [April 01, 2003] "Curing the Web's Identity Crisis: Subject Indicators for RDF." By Steve Pepper and Sylvia Schwab (Ontopia). Ontopia Technical Report. March 2003. "This paper describes the crisis of identity facing the World Wide Web and, in particular, the RDF community. It shows how that crisis is rooted in a lack of clarity about the nature of 'resources' and how concepts developed during the XML Topic Maps effort can provide a solution that works not only for Topic Maps, but also for RDF and semantic web technologies in general... The heart of the matter is the question 'What do URIs identify?' Today there is no consistent answer to this question... [Also:] 'What is a resource?' [...] Why is this important? Because without clarity on this issue, it is impossible to solve the challenge of the Semantic Web, and it is impossible to implement scaleable Web Services. It is impossible to achieve the goals of 'global knowledge federation' and impossible even to begin to enable the aggregation of information and knowledge by human and software agents on a scale large enough to control infoglut. Ontologies and taxonomies will not be reusable unless they are based on a reliable and unambiguous identification mechanism for the things about which they speak. The same applies to classifications, thesauri, registries, catalogues, and directories. Applications (including agents) that capture, collate or aggregate information and knowledge will not scale beyond a closely controlled environment unless the identification problem is solved. And technologies like RDF and Topic Maps that use URIs heavily to establish identity will simply not work (and certainly not interoperate) unless they can rely on unambiguous identifiers... The widely recognized 'identity crisis' of the Web is due to the absence of a formal distinction between information resources and subjects in general. This can be traced back to the definition of 'resource' in RFC 2396. Recognition of the important distinction made in Topic Maps between addressable and non-addressable subjects leads to the notion of subject indicators as an indirection mechanism for establishing the identity of subjects that cannot be addressed directly. This allows URIs to be used in two ways - as subject addresses or as subject identifiers - without ambiguity. Syntactic context can be used to determine which mode is intended in any specific instance. The concept of subject indicators also provides a powerful two-sided identification mechanism that can be used by both humans and applications. For RDF and other semantic web technologies to take advantage of this mechanism, changes are required in the underlying data model of RDF and the basic architecture of the Web. Once these are made, the foundation will have been laid for achieving the goals of the semantic web... A solution to the 'identity crisis of the Web' is clearly essential. The purpose of this paper is to offer an explanation of the root causes of the problem and to show how concepts originally developed as part of XML Topic Maps (XTM) offer a solution that can be applied to the semantic web in general..." [March 31, 2003] "Living With Topic Maps and RDF. Topic Maps, RDF, DAML, OIL, OWL, TMCL." By Lars Marius Garshol (Ontopia). Technical Report which extends and improves upon the earlier paper "Topic Maps, RDF, DAML, OIL: A Comparison," presented at XML 2001. "This paper is about the relationship between the topic map and RDF standards families. It compares the two technologies and looks at ways to make it easier for users to live in a world were both technologies are used. This is done by looking at how to convert information back and forth between the two technologies, how to convert schema information, and how to do queries across both information representations. Ways to achieve all of these goals are presented... The focus of this paper is to compare the models of the two technologies, and to use this comparison to describe ways in which the two technologies can be made to work together. In other words, the goal of this paper is to make it easier for users to live with both RDF and topic maps... While the technologies are clearly similar it is equally clear that they are intended for different purposes. Topic maps were created to support high-level indexing of sets of information resources to make the information in them findable. RDF, on the other hand, was intended to support the vision of the semantic web through providing structured metadata about resources and a foundation for logical inferencing... The key lessons [from the paper] are that: (1) Merging the two technologies does not appear desirable or possible. (2) It is possible to convert data back and forth between the two representations using simple, declarative, vocabulary-specific mappings. (3) This makes it possible for RDF and topic maps to have shared vocabularies. (4) RDF constraints can be converted to topic map constraints given such a mapping. (5) Semantic annotations in OWL can be translated directly into a topic map representation of the same information. That is, the descriptive part of OWL can be used both with RDF and with topic maps. (6) It is possible to create a single query language for both RDF and topic maps. In short, it does appear that it is possible to live with both RDF and topic maps..." [March 24, 2003] "." By Michael Classen. From WebReference.com (March 24, 2003). "In our last extension of the XMLMap we closed with a discussion of ontologies and topic maps, both concepts for expressing semantics of resources. I received many questions on the rather abstract nature of these concepts, as well as their practical applications and implications. This installment tries to explain topic maps with examples taken from our daily lives... Topics maps revolve around three basic concepts: Topics, Associations, and Occurrences... Up until now there has been no equivalent of the traditional back-of-book index in the world of electronic information. People have marked up keywords in their word processing documents and used these to generate indexes 'automatically', but the resulting indexes have remained as single documents. The World Wide Web removes the distinction between individual documents and now, indexes have to span multiple documents. Indexes have to cover vast pools of information, calling for the ability to merge indexes and to create user-defined views of information. In this situation, old-fashioned indexing techniques are clearly inadequate. The problem has been recognized for several decades in the realm of document processing, but the methodology used to address it - full text indexing - has only solved part of the problem, as anyone who has used search engines on the Internet knows only too well. Mechanical indexing cannot cope with the fact that the same subject may be referred to by multiple names ('synonyms'), nor that the same name may refer to multiple subjects ('homonyms'). Yet, this is basically how a web search engine works, so it is no surprise when you get thousands of irrelevant hits and still manage to miss the thing you are looking for! Topic maps provide an approach that marries the best of several worlds, including those of traditional indexing, library science and knowledge representation, with advanced techniques of linking and addressing. The author has realized the need for a map to the XML topic; a later installment will deal with XTM and an attempt to apply it to this Web site..." [March 10, 2003] Draft Requirements Document on Topic Maps Published Subjects. A posting from Bernard Vatant (Chair, OASIS Topic Maps Published Subjects TC) announces the publication of a final review working draft for Published Subjects: Introduction and Basic Requirements. The document provides an introduction to Published Subjects and specifies requirements and recommendations for publishers of PSI sets. The TC welcomes all relevant and knowledgeable comments from domain experts in information technology areas impacted by the requirements draft, viz., experts in RDF, Semantic Web, Controlled Vocabularies, and Ontologies; also Librarians, Taxonomists, and others who manage the legacy that is likely to provide the main source of Published Subjects. Published Subjects as defined in the draft Specification "provide an open, scaleable, URI-based method of identifying subjects of discourse. They cater for the needs of both humans and applications, and they provide mechanisms for ensuring confidence and trust on the part of users. Published Subjects are therefore expected to be of particular interest to publishers and users of ontologies, taxonomies, classifications, thesauri, registries, catalogues, and directories, and for applications (including agents) that capture, collate or aggregate information and knowledge." The OASIS Topic Maps Published Subjects Technical Committee has been chartered "to promote Topic Maps interoperability through the use of Published Subjects. A further goal is to promote interoperability between Topic Maps and other technologies that make explicit use of abstract representations of subjects, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), DAML+OIL, and the Web Ontology Language (OWL)." [March 07, 2003] "The HyTime Topic Maps (HyTM) Syntax 1.0." By Martin Bryan. In (March 07, 2003). ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 Information Technology -- Document Description and Processing Languages. ISO 13250 Project deliverable for review and comment. March 08, 2003. Status: "A first stab at defining HyTm, still incomplete." Abstract: "This specification defines a HyTime Topic Maps 1.0 (HyTM) syntax for topic maps based on the use of SGML architectural forms defined in ISO 10744, the Hypermedia/Time-based Structuring Language (HyTime). The syntactical expressions in HyTM documents are constrained using HyTime architectural forms that can be used to identify element types and attributes used to generate topic maps, together with explanatory prose and comments, while their interpretation is defined using The Standard Application Model for Topic Maps (SAM). Note that this is only a syntax specification; what the syntax represents is defined by SAM. This specification replaces the original definitions of the architectural forms defined in ISO 13250:2002..." From the Introduction: "A HyTM topic map is a topic map that has been identified from a DTD conforming to the HyTM syntax that consists of a topicmap conformant element with descendants. A HyTM resource is a HyTime conformant SGML or XML document that contains one or more HyTM topic maps. In a process known as deserialization, each HyTM topic map is read by a topic map processor, which produces from it a representation of the Standard Application Model (SAM), by following a procedure equivalent to the one defined in Clause 3 of this specification. The deserialization procedure is defined as a transformation that takes an element item from the HyTime Property Set defined in the HyTM Grove Plan as input and produces a Standard Application Model instance as output. This specification does not concern itself with the means by which the HyTime Property Set used as input is produced. In most cases it will be produced by SGML architectural processing, but other possibilities are specifically allowed, including parsing an XML document, architectural processing based on W3C Schema abstract types or XSLT transformation from other XML syntaxes..." [March 07, 2003] "Using Topic Maps to Extend Relational Databases." By Marc de Graauw. From XML.com (March 05, 2003). ['Marc de Graauw shows how to make databases more adaptable with Topic Maps.'] "Relational databases are great for storing structured data which conforms to a well-defined relational database schema. They are not so good at storing information that does not conform to such a schema. Since user requirements inevitably change, this means costly database upgrades. To avoid too many such upgrades, in a larger database one often sees provisions which allow users to add relevant information which does not fit nicely in the database schema. The lowest-level extension is a free-text field in a record which allows users to add textual data. Another common extension is the introduction of user-defined value lists. While such mechanisms are powerful, they are not standardized and do not easily allow the interchange of data. Topic Maps provide a very flexible and robust way to add arbitrary data to a relational databases at runtime. Moreover, Topic Maps come with a predefined exchange mechanism -- the XML Topic Maps (XTM) interchange syntax -- to allow data to be exported to XML... Topic Map paradigm provides a powerful way to add data to a relational database at runtime in a very flexible and powerful way. Topic Maps provide an excellent technique to overcome the natural limitations of relational databases: the constraining nature of the database schema. An added bonus is the ability to export the data as an XTM file, thus enabling interchange with other Topic Maps." [February 27, 2003] "Topic Map Constraint Language Requirements." By Graham Moore and Mary Nishikawa. 2003-02-23. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 N0xxx. Work product from ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 Information Technology -- Document Description and Processing Languages. Reference posted to the 'sc34wg3@isotopicmaps.org' mailing list on 2003-02-28 by Mary Nishikawa with Subject "TMCL Requirements Draft for Review." Supersedes the earlier document "Draft requirements, examples, and a 'low bar' proposal for Topic Map Constraint Language (TMCL)" ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 N226, 2001-05-24. This is the first public working draft for TMCL Requirements. "The Topic Map Constraint Language (TMCL) will provide a means to express constraints over and above the constraints currently defined by the Standard Application Model (Data Model for Topic Maps). Its goal will be to provide a language such that a topic map can be said to be conforming within a topic map or within a class of topic maps. It may help optimization both of topic map storage and of TMQL queries based on schema information. It may provide more intuitive user interfaces for creating and maintaining topic maps. This document will define the requirements that we expect the language will provide. TMCL is to be developed by ISO/JTC SC34 WG3 and this requirements document is for members of the committee and implementers who have expressed an interest in the development of a Topic Map Constraint Language... TMCL must define a standard way to explicitly indicate how topic map constructs are to be constrained. It should specify the topic characteristics a topic will have and the kinds of structures an association will have. TMCL shall be specified in terms of SAM (Standard Application Model for Topic Maps), a data model, and will not be specified on any serialization format for topic maps. This will automatically allow it to support both XTM & HyTM s well as LTM and AsTMa=, since these all have mappings to SAM..." [November 16, 2002] ISO SC34 Publishes Draft Reference Model for Topic Maps (RM4TM). A posting from Steven R. Newcomb announces the availability of a first public draft of The Reference Model for Topic Maps (RM4TM), produced by members of the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 Topic Map Models Project. The Reference Model defines "an abstract graph structure for the representation of relationships between subjects, rules for defining Applications of the Topic Maps paradigm, and rules for processing the information contained in topic maps. The primary objective of the Topic Maps paradigm is to make everything known about every subject accessible from a single location." In Newcomb's summary, the draft document "shows how to regard any data content notation, database schema, etc., as a topic map notation, so that its knowledge content can be automatically and losslessly amalgamated with all other kinds of knowledge content into a comprehensive topic map that honors the Subject Location Uniqueness Objective. The Subject Location Uniqueness Objective is to have one single subject per node, and for every participating subject to have one single node, even after any number of diverse topic maps have been merged together." ISO SC34 is also creating two new topic map standards: ISO 18048 "Topic Maps Query Language (TMQL)" provides a kind of SQL (or XML Query) for topic maps; ISO 19756 "Topic Maps Constraint Language (TMCL)" provides a schema or constraint language for use in constraining what is allowable to say in the topic map. [December 12, 2002] "Datatypes for XML Topic Maps (XTM): Using XML Schema Datatypes." By Murray Altheim (Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, UK). Draft version 1.4 2002/12/12. Topic map available in XML format, also zipped. Reference posted to the OASIS Topic Maps Published Subjects Technical Committee list. Abstract: "The W3C Recommendation XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes ('XSD') provides a specification of datatypes and their facets, and forms the semantic basis of this document, which establishes Published Subject Indicators (PSIs) for each XML Schema datatype and facet. A PSI is a (relatively) stable URL used as a canonical identifier for a subject, particularly within an XML Topic Map (XTM) document, though application of PSIs is not limited to XTM. This document does not alter any XML Schema datatype definition; for definitions of each datatype..." Author's note: "I'm pleased to announce a first draft of something that's been in the works for over a year... The ability to constrain or 'type' topic characteristics is something necessary within the topic map community. Constraints on topic map structures may be provided by various forms of schema facilities, such as TMCL, but a simple datatyping feature is still something sorely missing. There are some examples provided in the document... I welcome comments or suggestions towards establishing 'best practices' for use of these PSIs, as well as comments on the structures within the provided topic map. I am willing to add visualizations of various parts of the topic map if that is considered helpful." [December 18, 2002] "The XML Papers: Lessons on Applying Topic Maps." By Steve Pepper and Lars Marius Garshol (Ontopia). Presentation given at the IDEAlliance XML 2002 Conference, Baltimore, December 2002. "This paper describes some of the basic steps in applying topic maps in a real world application, a topic map-driven web portal of conference papers. It covers the tasks of collecting and examining source data, defining an ontology and populating a topic map. It discusses tools for automatically creating topic maps, with particular emphasis on how the synergies between topic maps and RDF can be exploited in the process of autogenerating topic maps from structured and semi-structured source data. It also provides an introduction to the concept of published subjects, describes how they are being applied in this project and details the benefits that they are expected to bring in both this and other projects... We will briefly describe the goals of XML Papers project and then concentrate on the work that has actually been performed to date, paying special attention to methodologies, technologies and the lessons we have learned. The project is not yet complete, although a substantial topic map and application already exists that covers a dozen or so conferences. That application will be demonstrated during the presentation and the conference exhibition. The idea of producing a 'next generation' topic map of not just one GCA conference, but all of them was conceived by the present authors and embraced by IDEAlliance (the GCA's successor). The goal of the project is to collate (as much as possible of) a decade's papers on XML and related technologies, index them using topic maps, and make them accessible through a topic map-driven web portal. A secondary goal is to provide input to the XMLvoc technical committee working on defining published subjects for the domain of XML. The XMLvoc TC [Vocabulary for XML Standards and Technologies TC] is one of several committees working under the auspices of OASIS in the area of published subjects, which are described later..." [December 18, 2002] "The Economics of the Topic Maps Reference Model." By Steven R. Newcomb (Coolheads Consulting). Presentation given at the IDEAlliance XML 2002 Conference, Baltimore, December 2002. "The draft ISO standard Reference Model of the Topic Maps paradigm meets technical requirements that are strikingly parallel to the same economic principles that are evidently most conducive to worldwide economic growth... The Topic Maps Reference Model is basically a distinction -- and a well-defined boundary -- between two things: (1) The minimum set of structural features that knowledge must always be regarded as having, if we are to have a convenient way of aggregating any kinds of independently-maintained knowledge with any other kinds of independently-maintained knowledge, in a lossless, predictable, useful, and affordable fashion. (2) All the other features that knowledge can have, including those that may need to be constrained in diverse ways within diverse contexts. The Topic Maps Reference Model takes the position that the minimum set of structural features that must be common to all knowledge, in order to allow all kinds of knowledge to be aggregated, are a set of constraints on the structure of semantic networks. The kind of semantic network that is defined by the Reference Model is called a 'topic map graph'. In a topic map graph, every node is a surrogate for exactly one subject (as in 'subject of conversation'), and no two nodes are surrogates for the same subject. All nodes are connected to each other by nondirectional arcs. The Reference Model provides exactly four kinds of arcs, each of which is used in the same very specific way in each 'assertion'. In the Reference Model, assertions are the primary units of knowledge. Every assertion is a set of specific nodes interconnected in specific ways by specific kinds of arcs. Assertions represent relationships between subjects, and in each assertion, each related subject plays a specific role (called a 'role type'), which is itself a subject. Each assertion can itself be an instance of an 'assertion type', which is also a subject..." [December 18, 2002] "Topic Map Authoring With Reusable Ontologies and Automated Knowledge Mining." By Joshua Reynolds and W. Eliot Kimber (ISOGEN International, LLC). Presentation given at the IDEAlliance XML 2002 Conference, Baltimore, December 2002. "Topic Maps and their supporting infrastructure are quickly achieving the level of maturity needed to make them useful as part of the basic information management toolkit. With increasing vendor support, standardization activities, and interest in the field of Knowledge Representation and Interchange, it is clear that Topic Maps are here to stay. Unfortunately all of this progress and interest in no way eases the formidable task of authoring Topic Maps. Our experience indicates that XSLT works well for Topic Map generation over sets of XML resources. Markup, through it's design and implementation, frequently captures a good deal of semantic information, making it a perfect candidate for knowledge extraction. There are essentially two ways of extracting that knowledge into a Topic Map when those marked-up resources conform to a known schema (DTD, RELAX-NG, XSD, or even just an in-house convention). The first is hand authoring. This involves reading the document and using human reasoning to interpret the markup and it's content, then creating the Topic Map from this information. The second is to use the schema itself. By applying knowledge extraction techniques to the schema, we can use the same logic across an arbitrarily large set of conforming documents. As markup is easily machine processed, incorporating this reasoning in some sort of algorithmic form is clearly desirable. Going from markup (XML) to markup (XTM) makes XSLT the prime candidate for expressing this algorithm. Topic Map merging enables these generated XTMs to be combined with topical information that can't be extracted using a style-sheet. Although the former allows for more precision, the latter implies far less cost, both in terms of initial effort, as well as maintenance (only the style-sheet must be authored/maintained). This paper provides a case study used to illustrate how to ease the task of Topic Map creation through a multi-stage modularized process. The first stage is hand authoring a relatively invariant 'ontology' Topic Map. This consists of defining the ontology of types and associations that capture the data model for a particular subject domain. The assumption is that this ontology would be relatively stable over time, and a good candidate for reuse. The second is generating additional Topic Maps through an algorithmic process (XSLT) applied to XML document instances. The third is hand authoring those things not captured in the first two stages. This consists of the capture of information not directly discernible from the markup, or stored in non-XML resources. The resultant Topic Maps are merged giving a Topic Map that can be as rich as if completely hand authored. We present the source documents and code (stylesheets) used in an exploratory implementation of this approach, and lay out a more generalized approach to using this methodology. We finish by identifying possible issues with this approach, as well as enumerating alternatives, and stating the conclusions we were able to infer from our exploration..." [December 18, 2002] "Using DAML+OIL as a Constraint Language for Topic Maps." By Eric Freese (LexisNexis). Presentation given at the IDEAlliance XML 2002 Conference, Baltimore, December 2002. "Over the past year or so, the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) and DARPA have been working to create a framework to model information ontologies contained on the Web. The result of that work is known as DARPA Agent Markup Language + Ontology Interface Layer (DAML+OIL). DAML+OIL provides a rich set of constructs, using RDF, to create ontologies and mark up information to be machine readable and processable. Some of the constructs are much more powerful than what is currently enabled by the topic map model. These include: (1) The ability to define not only subclass-superclass relationships but also disjoint relationships; (2) The ability to place restrictions on when specific relationships are applicable; (3) The ability to apply cardinality to relationships. The topic map standard provides several features that RDF cannot match, especially in its association model and the ability to define scopes for information (even though there is still discussion about how scope should really work). While certain inferences about how objects are related can be derived from a topic map, DAML+OIL has extended RDF to do things topic maps can't. The constructs mentioned above would be very useful in topic maps to allow intelligent inferences about objects (whether or not they are topics or resources) and to accurately build a knowledge base from a set of information, be it a small corporate document repository or the entire Web. This paper will demonstrate how DAML+OIL can be used to provide additional capabilities that are currently missing from the topic map model. It will discuss possible additions to the topic map model or its companion standard, Topic Map Constraint Language (TMCL) [REQs] , to enable DAML+OIL to process and enhance topic maps. It will also discuss methods for using DAML+OIL in conjunction with topic maps to take advantage of the best from both worlds..." [December 18, 2002] "Topic Maps: Backbone of Content Intelligence." By Jean Delahousse (Mondeca). Presentation given at the IDEAlliance XML 2002 Conference, Baltimore, December 2002. "Industrial enterprises, administrations and editors have a long history of organizing information so as to facilitate access and exchange. Developed for the world of print publication, these earlier solutions need to be incorporated now into the newer ones that are specifically adapted for digital content. The term 'Content Intelligence' encompasses the different tools and methods that would allow companies to capitalize on their existing skills and resources even while offering fresh solutions for new stakes... Topic Maps tools are ideally suited for providing the infrastructure to content intelligence solutions because of: the separation between subject management, subject organization and contents; (2) the ability to implement decentralized interoperable solutions; (3) the ability to reuse and exploit the existing information organization within the enterprises. These strengths explain the proliferation of operational projects based on the Topic Maps standard and tools within various industries, the publishing world and in administration... Several elements are still missing in the Topic Maps standard and its derivative software for the solutions implemented to be complete and interoperable: the finalization of the PSI standard a standardization, within the Topic Maps framework, of the most commonly used models of knowledge organization so as to ensure interoperability of the solutions implemented the definition of generic APIs, Web services and standards that would together facilitate the emergence of a dialogue between the different software components of a Content Intelligence solution But, as of today, these different challenges have already been identified by the different actors and are progressively finding solutions within the framework of standardization committees, operational projects for clients and industrial collaborations among the different providers of technical solutions..." [December 18, 2002] "Articulating Conceptual Spaces Using the Topic Map Standard." By Helka Folch and Benoît Habert (Human-Machine Communication Department - LIMSI CNRS). Presentation given at the IDEAlliance XML 2002 Conference, Baltimore, December 2002. "Topic Maps (ISO13250) is a powerful standard for the semantic annotation of document collections... However the construction of a topic map can be very costly and can quickly become a bottleneck in any large-scale application if recourse is not made to automatic methods. Apart from the initial cost of defining the topic map, problems of maintenance and coherence may arise when the topic map is applied to renewable information sources, as manual construction and maintenance can not keep pace with any significant amount of incoming documents. A manual approach to topic map construction is adapted if the conceptual model is stable and is linked to a circumscribed collection of resources, but is ill suited to manage dynamic, loosely-structured information sources. The volume of data channeled through the Internet and large intranets today requires not only indexing new resources 'on the fly' but re-structuring the semantic model as new concepts and varying points of view spring up. One possible approach to topic map construction involves recycling of structured or semi-structured data and exploiting pre-existing knowledge sources for semantic indexing. This implies that a semantic model is available in advance, to which information instances are attached in a top-down manner. However, the large majority of electronic resources available today are unstructured. This has generated a need to extract semantic information and build topic maps from unrestricted text for which the vocabulary and conceptual models are not known in advance. In contrast to a top-down approach, in this latter data-driven approach a document collection is not a passive repository of topic instances but rather a tool for discovery from which semantic categories are made to emerge through inductive methods. This approach has been applied within the context of 'monitor corpora' such as the electronic version of the Wall Street Journal. The periodical analysis of these corpora is aimed at monitoring a given domain in view of detecting emerging topics, for a technology watch task, for instance. The work we present in this paper, describes an inductive method for building topic maps from unrestricted text. Our approach does not use pre-existing knowledge sources, but rather exploits regularities of word pattern distribution within a collection of documents..." [December 10, 2002] "The Standard Application Model for Topic Maps." By Lars Marius Garshol and Graham Moore (JTC1/SC34). With cover page. Document reference: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 N0356. Editor's draft for review and comment. Date: 2002-12-04. Produced for ISO 13250 (Project editors: Steven R. Newcomb, Michel Biezunski, Martin Bryan), ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 Information Technology - Document Description and Processing Languages. "This document defines the structure and interpretation of topic maps by defining the semantics of topic map constructs using prose, and the structure of such constructs using a semi-formal data model. Together with the Reference Model specification and the HyTM syntax specification this document will supersede ISO 13250 [ISO/IEC 13250:2002 Topic Maps, ISO, Geneva, 2002]. Together with the XTM syntax specification this document will supersede XTM [XML Topic Maps (XTM) 1.0 Specification, TopicMaps.Org, 2001]. It is intended to become part of the new ISO 13250 standard... This international standard requires that topic map implementations must have internal representations of topic maps that have a clearly documented correspondence to the model defined in this document. This international standard also defines a number of structural constraints and operations on instances of the model, to which its implementations must conform. The process of exporting topic maps from an implementation's internal representation to an instance of a topic map syntax is known as serialization. The opposite process, that of building such a representation from information encoded using a topic map syntax, is known as deserialization. Conforming specifications of topic map syntaxes must define these processes in terms of the model specified in this specification, although they are not required to define both operations. A syntax may be conforming even if it does not represent all the information in this model. A topic map processor is any module or system that can process topic maps in conformance with this standard. It is assumed that the topic map processor does its work on behalf of another module known as the topic map application. This international standard assumes that a topic map processor will do deserialization on behalf of the application, and that the processor will manage the topic maps on behalf of the application..." A posting from Robert Barta reports on research at Bond University focused upon topic map constraints. The "AsTMa language family is designed to support authoring, updating, constraining and querying of Topic Maps... Whenever Topic Maps are authored, they might have to follow a particular structure. In the same way as relational databases are constrained by schemas and XML languages follow constraints (provided by DTDs, XML Schemas, Schematrons, ...), Topic Maps can also be constrained by a constraint or a set of constraints. AsTMa! is one AsTMa sub-language which allows to formulate such constraints. Conceptually, AsTMa! is a language to define ontologies. For our purposes here an ontology is defined as: a set of concepts (vocabulary), a type system connecting the concepts of the vocabulary, and qualitative and quantitative rules on the structure and extent of associations..." See the draft version 0.4 of the AsTMa! Language Definition and the tutorial. The ISO SC34 WG3 is working on ISO 19756: Topic Maps Constraint Language (TMCL) which "will provide a schema or constraint language for topic maps; using TMCL one can write schemas for topic maps that constrain what is allowed to say in the topic map, such as 'a person must be born in a place,' 'a person must have at least one name,' and so on. A TMCL requirements draft has been produced. ISO/IEC FCD 13250:1999 - Topic Maps. Approved text for DIS ballot. 19-April-1999. Prepared by: ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 - Document Description and Processing Languages. Project Editors: Michel Biezunski, Martin Bryan, Steve Newcomb. [cache] Emnekart Norge 2002. A 2002-09 communiqué from Lars Marius Garshol announces a TopicMap Conference arranged by the Norwegian XML User's Group, together with Creuna, Empolis, and Ontopia. "The world's first Topic Map Conference will be held at Clarion Hotel Royal Christiania, Oslo, Norway on October 18th 2002. Emnekart Norge 2002 will focus on the business case for topic maps and will feature presentations from Steve Pepper, Lars Marius Garshol, Kal Ahmed, and others." See the conference links. [October 08, 2002] Related: Exchangable Faceted Metadata Language (XFML) Version 1.0. A communiqué from Peter Van Dijck announces the version 1.0 release of the XFML Core - eXchangeable Faceted Metadata Language. XFML Core "is an open XML format for publishing and sharing hierarchical faceted metadata and indexing efforts. XFML is a model to express topics, organised in hierarchies or trees within mutually exclusive containers called facets. It also expresses indexing efforts: metadata you have assigned to pages. It lets you publish this information in an open, XML based format. Finally, XFML lets you build connections between different XFML maps, by indicating that a topic in one map is equal to a topic in another map (we call this connecting topics), or that a topic is described on a certain resource (a webpage usually; we call this published subject indicators). Facetmap, an application to browse faceted metadata, was the first application to import XFML... The real power of XFML lies in the concept of connecting topics. This allows you to reuse indexing efforts. It means you don't have to index the entire web yourself, you can reuse parts of other XFML maps. Metadata authoring applications that take advantage of this concept are being developed." [Full context] [October 01, 2002] "Topic Maps for Managing Classification Guidance." By Vinh Lê (U. S. Department of Energy, Office of Security, Information Classification and Control Policy -SO-12) and James David Mason (Y-12 National Security Complex). Paper presented at 2002 Extreme Markup Languages Conference 2002 in Montréal. "The Department of Energy (DOE) and its predecessor agencies have had a long history of developing and handling sensitive, classified information. Since the Manhattan Project, identification of classified information has been supported by principles and rules, called 'classification topics,' in guidance documents that are published for use by authorized classifiers across the DOE complex. Managing DOE classification guidance adds to the usual problems of document management. Coordination of multiple dependencies among master and derived documents and classification topics is needed to ensure consistency. The Topic Maps technique is being applied to organize classification guidance topics according to unique subjects so that duplicate topics, inconsistent topics, and gaps in classification guidance become obvious for corrective actions. Once topics are logically organized and linked, then when a change in a guidance topic is proposed, system users will know which related topics need a review or change. Development of an overall guidance-management system also involves creation of a new XML-based publishing system to replace the diverse and often inadequate tools used in the past. A document-management system to support the publishing system will require integration with the guidance-management system in addition to the conventional tools for revision control and file management. We have begun to construct the topic maps for guidance management and are in the process of refining a design of topic maps to manage the publishing process... We have been able to demonstrate the map, and we already have feedback from the user community about things they would like to see presented differently. We are now designing new HTML and JSP pages to replace the generic interface. As part of the Ferret project, Y-12 developed a simple editor for knowledge bases. Because of the similarity between the Ferret knowledge base structure and this topic map, we are modifying the editor to write out topic-map components. The next step will probably be to implement a topic-map editor, since the files in question are not conducive to easy editing in a conventional XML editor. In the next year, besides the considerable redesign of the interface, we expect to start on the implementation of the content-management system and the extensions to both the topic map and the interface to support it..." [October 16, 2002] "Introducing Topic Maps. A Powerful, Subject-Oriented Approach to Structuring Sets of Information." By Kal Ahmed (Techquila). In XML Journal Volume 03, Issue 10 (October 2002). "Topic maps are a standard way of representing the complex relationships that often exist between the pieces of information that we use in day-to-day business processes. This article begins by discussing what topic maps are, what they can do, and what people are currently using them for. However, my main goal is to introduce the basic concepts of topic maps and their representation in XML... Almost all XML vocabularies are designed with a single purpose: to describe information in a way that enables automated processing. We use XML to describe document structures so our documents can be rendered as HTML, WML, PDF, or some other presentation format. We also use XML so that business systems can interchange data reliably. Both the ability to render content to different output formats and the reliability of data interchange arise from a predefined agreement about how individual pieces of markup describe the information they wrap... Current applications can be broken down into three major purposes: (1) A way to improve accessibility to information; (2) A flexible, extensible data structure for standalone applications; (3) An integration layer between existing applications. 'Topic maps for information accessibility' is by far the largest category of current applications of topic maps. Topic maps are being used as the structuring paradigm for portals to all sorts of information. Because they're subject oriented, they provide an intuitive way for users to find their way around large sets of information. Using a topic map, the information provider can create a high-level overview of the concepts covered by the documents. Users can then navigate the overview to find the subject area of interest before accessing the related documents. You can also go the other way - from a document to a list of all subjects in the document and from there to other documents related to the same subject(s). Because all of this structure is explicit in the topic map, navigating from subject to document and back again can be done without requiring the user to construct search terms. Many commercial topic map tools focus on making information more findable and presenting navigation structures for topic maps. Thus, once you have your information structured using topics maps, it's possible to get a configurable, off-the-shelf application to do the work of presenting that structure to the end users. The topic map paradigm is a powerful, subject-oriented approach to structuring sets of information. The building blocks of topic maps are topics that have names and point to occurrences of the subject in external resources. Associations relate topics to each other. Each topic in an association is the player of a defined role. Topics, occurrences, and associations can all be typed by other topics. In addition, topic names, occurrences, and the roles they play in associations can be specified to be valid only in a given context by the use of a scope, which is defined by a collection of topics..." [alt URL] [October 01, 2002] "Guide to the XML Schema Specifications." Techquila's Topicmap-powered browser for the W3C XML Schema Specifications. By Kal Ahmed (Techquila). October 01, 2002. "The W3C XML Schema standards are often accused of being over-complex and difficult to read. In an attempt to assist those trying to find their way around the W3C specifications, I have created a multi-modal topic map of the specifications. In this topic map you will find indexes of the terms used by the specifications and the main concepts of XML Schema. The topic maps are primarily created automatically using MDF to process the XML Schema specifications and the schema for XML Schema. The topic maps are then integrated by merging them with a hand-crafted topic map created using TMTab. A static HTML site has been created from the topic maps and can be browsed [online]. The application that produces this HTML output is based on TM4J and Jakarta Velocity. For more information about the creation and publication of topic maps using open-source and free software; or to get the topic map files themselves, please contact Kal Ahmed directly..." [From the posting: "I've spent a little time creating topic maps from the XML Schema family of specifications. The HTML-ized result is now [online]... This is a first stab at trying to topicmap the specs so comments on both presentation and content would be very welcome. For the topic map nerds, the XTM files are available; send me an email if you would like them. My thanks to Jeni Tennison who provided some really helpful hints in getting me started on this project (though all the mistakes are mine!)."] For schema description and references, see "XML Schemas." [August 07, 2002] Topic Maps for the Web. Addison-Wesley Professional has announced the release of XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web, described as a "complete introduction and application guide to the world of topic maps." Edited by Jack Park and Sam Hunting, the book contains contributions from sixteen authorities on topic maps. The volume "introduces the topic maps paradigm, global federated knowledge interchange, the topic map standards and specifications, the basics of XTM markup, Published Subject Indicators, ontological engineering, open source topic map software, topic map visualization, topic maps and RDF, semantic networks, and knowledge organization and representation -- all with a wealth of technical detail. Originally designed to handle the construction of indexes, glossaries, thesauri, and tables of contents, [Topic Maps] can provide a foundation for the Semantic Web. They can serve to represent information currently stored as database schemas (relational and object). Where databases only capture the relations between information objects, topic maps also allow these objects to be connected to the various places where they occur. Knowledge bases can be designed that not only relate concepts together but also can point to the resources relevant to each concept." [Full context] [May 03, 2002] ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 Publishes Standard Application Model for Topic Maps Review Draft. An Editor's draft version of The Standard Application Model for Topic Maps has been published for review. It has been produced under ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34: Information Technology - Document Description and Processing Languages. The document "defines the structure and interpretation of topic map information by defining the semantics of topic map constructs using prose, and their structure using a formal data model. This specification supersedes ISO13250 and XTM (XML Topic Maps); it is intended to become part of the new ISO 13250 standard. Topic maps are abstract structures which encode information about a domain and connect this information to information resources that are considered relevant to the domain. Topic maps are organized around topics, which are symbols representing real-world things, associations representing relationships between the things, and occurrences, which connect the topic map to information resources pertinent to the topics... It is expected that topic map implementations will have internal representations of topic map information that have a well-defined correspondence to the model defined in this document. This specification also defines a number of structural constraints and operations on the model, which implementations are expected to conform to." [Full context] [April 12, 2002] "A High-level Description of a Draft Reference Model for ISO 13250 Topic Maps." By Steven R. Newcomb and Michel Biezunski (Co-editors, ISO/IEC 13250). Document reference: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 N0298 Rev. 1. From ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34, Information Technology -- Document Description and Processing Languages. April 04, 2002. [Note the status description: "Draft High-level Description of forthcoming Editor's Draft." A draft of this document was first prepared for the XML Europe 2002 Conference, Barcelona, Spain, May, 2002.] "The purpose of ontologies (sets of knowledge-bearing assertion types), taxonomies (classes of things, ideas, etc.), and vocabularies (such as markup vocabularies) is to allow the human members of communities of interest to communicate among themselves about the things with which their communities are concerned. However, knowledge that is represented in the terms of a specific community may have high value outside its community of origin. How can distinct bodies of knowledge, created and maintained by distinct, non-cooperating communities, be made usefully available in contexts other than their communities of origin? One answer is to merge them with other bodies of knowledge, in conformance with the Reference Model of ISO 13250 Topic Maps... In the draft Reference Model, a topic map is seen as a set of 'assertions', no more and no less. Each assertion asserts the existence of a strongly-typed relationship between some specific set of subjects of conversation. Each such subject is a 'role player' in the assertion; it plays a specific role in the relationship. The ontologies of Applications may include an unbounded number of kinds of assertions ('assertion types'). The roles, the role players, the assertions themselves, and the types of the assertions, are all regarded as subjects, and any of these features of an assertion can be role players in other assertions. Every topic map is a graph, and every assertion within a topic map is a subgraph within that graph. According to the draft Reference Model, graphs of topic maps consist of 'nodes' (also sometimes called 'vertices' or 'vertexes' or 'topics') and four distinct kinds of nondirectional 'arcs' or 'edges' that connect the nodes to one another. The Reference Model establishes a single graphic meta-structure for all assertions... The draft Reference Model is extremely simple: four arc types and two built-in asserti |
