Larsblog

I sat down to try the Google Maps API yesterday, and came away very impressed by both it and the new AJAX style of web applications. Here is an introduction to the API, together with some musings on how it could be used with Topic Maps. ...

Last time I wrote about how I used OSL to extract a fragment from a topic map. Today I've been working on the TMRA'05 paper on TM/XML, which also describes TM-Views. TM-Views is a mechanism for extracting fragments from topic maps created by Dmitry Bogachev, and I thought applying it to the example in my previous blog entry would be a useful way for me to really get to grips with it. I'd also like to see how TM-Views compares with using OSL. ...

I've been thinking for a long time about how to easily extract meaningful subsets from a topic map, without having to do any custom programming. This is a quite general problem that recurs again and again in real use of Topic Maps. ...

The meeting started with a show-and-tell session, where people showed each other various tools and projects they were working on. I didn't attend this session, and instead spent the time preparing for the TMQL session. ...

Day 2 started with a presentation by Naito-san about a proposal from him and Komachi-san about a standard format for publishing PSIs. They suggest using Dublin Core to describe the PSIs. They also suggest creating topic maps to describe the PSIs. Finally, they brought up the question of which standards body should do the work (OASIS or ISO). Again, I'll link to the slides once I have them. ...

This is an unofficial report from the winter meeting of ISO JTC1 SC34. This is the committee responsible for SGML, DSDL (XML schema language framework), and Topic Maps, which usually has a meeting late in the year in conjunction with the XML USA conference. This year it's in Atlanta. The report is mostly about what Working Group 3 is doing, since this is the Working Group focusing on Topic Maps. ...

I've argued for a long time that the RTM vocabulary for mapping RDF to Topic Maps makes it possible to use RDF vocabularies in Topic Maps. Nobody has really picked this up yet, probably because the presentation in the original paper makes it something of a challenge to see exactly how to do that. ...

(Second day of semi-live coverage from the TMRA'05 Topic Maps research workshop.) ...

This is a semi-live report from the first Topic Maps conference: TMRA'05 in Leipzig. ...

For some reason a large number of people continue to believe that XTM is Topic Maps, which just isn't the case. This happens over and over again, and has all kinds of consequences. Sometimes it's no worse than people calling the technology "XML Topic Maps", other times people will make mathematical models of XTM or really implement the syntax as their model, which can be bad enough to render their work irrelevant. Which is of course a shame. ...