Larsblog

HØYKOM, a Norwegian research funding agency, arranged a seminar about Topic Maps in Leikanger, a village in western Norway. To get there from Oslo you have to fly turboprop for 40 minutes to Sogndal airport, then drive for another 40 minutes out along the fjord. The place itself has maybe 1000 inhabitants, but is the location for norge.no (Norway.no; central Norwegian governmental web portal), which is why the seminar was held here. ...

It's been snowing in Oslo more or less continuously since the early hours of Monday, and it's now late Wednesday evening. We had a lot of snow here from before, so the result is a snow record: the last time we had this much snow in Oslo was 1968. Altogether it's about two feet. ...

The tolog query language has been around for a long time, but so far it only does querying, and not updates. As far as I know, no other query language for Topic Maps does updates, either. An update language is interesting for three reasons: ...

This year there are two major Topic Maps events coming up where anyone with an interest in Topic Maps should be present. The first takes place in Oslo in late March and is the annual Norwegian Topic Maps conference, called Emnekart 2006. This is the fourth time it's being held, but for the first time it will be bilingual; that is, there will be an English track running through the entire conference, as well as side-tracks in Norwegian. ...

The Fränkische Schweiz, or Franconian Switzerland, is a small, hilly area north of Nürnberg between Bamberg and Bayreuth which is full of idyllic small towns and villages, strange rock formations, and small streams and rivers. More importantly, it's also full of small family breweries. After we left Bamberg we headed into this area towards Kulmbach, and after visiting Kulmbach and Bayreuth we headed back in for some sightseeing (and beer research).

Norm Walsh had the excellent idea of publishing a map showing his travels (via Column Two), and I couldn't resist the temptation to do the same. Of course, I used what I've learned about the Google Maps API to create an interactive map instead.

Bamberg is an outstandingly beautiful city and also home of the Rauchbier (literally "smoke beer"), and so the visit here was one of the high points on our trip. It turns out that Bamberg has no less than nine breweries, so sampling all the Bamberg beers actually requires quite a bit of work. All of the breweries have their own taverns or biergartens serving the beer, and two also combine the tavern with an inn where you can stay at a very reasonable price. ...

I realized quite a while ago (a year ago, maybe) that it's possible to implement SPARQL on top of tolog without too much effort. Ontopia has never done anything about this since we have not seen any interest in this feature, but recently I got some questions about this, so I figured it might be worth writing up the basic idea. ...

When I went to Leipzig for the TMRA '05 conference I discovered that Leipzig is actually the home town of a rather obscure beer speciality, called Gose. Gose is like a cross between Berliner Weisse and Belgian witbier in that it's a sour wheat beer spiced with salt and coriander. This may sound like a tall tale, but I assure you it is actually true. ...

The design of TM/XML, first heard of at TMRA'05, has now at long last been finalized, and the paper about it sent off to the publishers. I figured this was a good time to spread the word a little more, so here is a short introduction to TM/XML. ...