Larsblog

This week I am in Beijing to teach Topic Maps to the developers of a Chinese start-up company, which is developing a new product based on Topic Maps. I'll get back to the subject of the start-up and the training in a later posting. For now I'm so excited about being in China again that I'll confine myself to that subject. I was here for three weeks in 2004, and found myself absolutely fascinated, so I am more than happy to get another chance to visit. ...

After I posted my blog entry on typed data in tolog Geir Ove had an interesting idea: why couldn't the type conversion predicates be dynamic? Dynamic predicates are something that, as far as I know, is unique to tolog. They are not predefined, and they are not user-defined, but are instead dynamically created from the structure of the underlying topic map. ...

We've known for a long time that sooner or later we'd have to start supporting data types (numbers, dates, ...) in tolog, but so far we haven't done it. At the moment, the only way you can produce numeric data, for example, is through the count() aggregate function (almost true). All information retrieved from the topic map is either topic map objects or strings. The ironic thing is that the language (and implementation) actually supports typed data; it's the underlying Topic Maps implementation that doesn't support it. ...

I've been reviewing beers on RateBeer.com for a while now, especially Norwegian beers, and thought it might be interesting to take a look at how the different Norwegian brewers have fared in my ratings. RateBeer allows premium subscribers to download a CSV file containing all their ratings, and so producing a table of Norwegian brewers ranked by average rating was a simple matter of a little Python programming. ...

Tagging is an interesting and useful technique, but the way it's currently used lacks a lot, and I think Topic Maps are the perfect way to fill the gap between what tagging is and what it should be. ...

A week ago or so I received an email from my girlfriend about a play she wanted to see at the National Theatre: Gildet på Solhaug, or The Feast at Solhaug, by Ibsen. The play was to be performed in the restaurant at the theatre, accompanied by medieval food (the play takes place in, well, it's not entirely clear when, but it sounds as though it might be around 1300), and three kinds of beer from Nøgne Ø. I of course said yes at once, and so we went tonight. ...

I finally got my copy of the TMRA'05 proceedings on Friday, and have been reading my way through them ever since. So far I've gotten to page 77, and I've enjoyed the trip thus far. What the book contains is the papers accepted at the conference, revised based on comments from the editors (Lutz Maicher and Jack Park) and on feedback received at the conference. In addition comes a 10-page report on the open space sessions written by Alexander Sigel. ...

Lots of people think that the hierarchical association type used in taxonomies is the supertype-subtype association, but this is, unfortunately, wrong. After running into three instances of this misunderstanding this week, I decided to do my bit to clear this up once and for all. ...

This was the fourth Norwegian Topic Maps conference (emnekart is Norwegian for Topic Maps), and for the first time it was not entirely in Norwegian, as this year there was an English track through the whole conference. It was also the first year the conference sold out. ...

It's now official. The Emnekart 2006 conference (the Norwegian Topic Maps conference) passed 220 registered attendees today, which means that it's full. There is more room for people in the restaurant, and on the stairs in the lecture halls, but the venue says it's inadvisable to go above this number because of general comfort, air quality, etc ...