Larsblog

I've been tasting all the Norwegian beer I could find for years, and tonight I had an experience I didn't think I could have in Norway any more. I've just spent an entire evening drinking Norwegian specialty beers, none of which I'd ever tasted before, and I had to leave many more beers behind when leaving. Clearly something good has happened to the Norwegian beer market. ...

In all the Topic Maps-related documents I read these days people use "Topic Maps", "Topic Map", "topic maps", and "topic map" indiscriminately when referring to the Topic Maps technology. Sometimes people even mix it up within a single document. For a long time there was no official definition of what was appropriate, but the 2005-10-28 TMDM draft introduced a consistent terminology for this. So far it doesn't seem that many people have noticed this (admittedly subtle) change. So here goes. ...

A strange thing I've noticed is that hardly anyone cites the ISO Topic Maps standards correctly in papers. I'm not sure why this is, but I thought I would do my bit to help people get this right. ...

Sunday morning I woke up in Seoul; Monday evening I went to sleep in the family summer house on a tiny island outside Arendal in southern Norway. The contrast could hardly have been greater, in every possible way. ...

The last day of the week in Seoul was given over to AToMS, Asian Topic Maps Summit, a one-day conference devoted to Topic Maps. The conference was organized by the two Korean standards agencies (KATS and KSA), and attracted more than 200 attendees. I arrived a little late (in order to get some sleep), and by then it was hard to get a seat. ...

The last day of the Seoul meeting also had the closing plenary in the morning, with lots of excitement around who would vote what regarding the OpenXML submission from ECMA and Microsoft. I missed all of this, however, in favour or more training in the TMRM from Robert Barta. He walked us through most of his mapping from TMQL to TMRM, and the details in the optimization of the resulting expressions. ...

The meeting is now beginning to settle into a kind of daily rhythm that seems to run: two separate WG3 meetings, enormous lunch, plenary WG3 meeting, vast dinner, drinks, sleep, then start over. This already gives you the big picture of the day. ...

Day 2 of the Seoul meeting started with the opening plenary, where much attention was given to the standardization of Open Document Format (ODF) and OpenXML. Microsoft and IBM both had representatives at the plenary, and the Secretary General of ECMA was there. I, however, was not, as Robert Barta, Graham Moore, and I had a breakout session on TMQL instead. We spent a couple of hours on issues with TMQL, and came away with a strong feeling that the language is beginning to solidify quite nicely. ...

The spring ISO meeting is this year in Seoul, and this is actually the first time in the history of SC34 that it has a meeting in Asia. This was more than a little overdue, given that there has been heavy Japanese attendance at these meetings for more than a decade, and heavy Korean attendance for the last 4-5 years. Of course, I personally am also very happy to get a trip to Seoul, which is also a very interesting city. (More on this later, if possible.) ...

One thing that's lacking in the current set of Topic Maps standards is defined identifiers for the Topic Maps constructs, like subject, topic, association, etc. The TMDM doesn't really need this for its own purposes, but it does mean that there are some semantics that aren't described as fully as they could be. There are also other standards (TMCL and TMQL) which could make use of such identifiers (with additional semantics). ...