Semantic Web School interviews
As part of the promotion of TMRA 2007, Lutz arranged to have some of the speakers interviewed by the Semantic Web School for their August newsletter. It's not the first time I've been interviewed, but it doesn't exactly happen very often, either, so I'm quite happy about this. ...
Read | 2007-08-23 19:31 | 0 comment(s)
Search in Topic Maps portals
One of the features that sets Topic Maps-based portals apart is their support for search, which is generally better than in ordinary portals. However, implementing search in any given portal generally requires lots of discussion with the customer and interaction designers, and it's not always clear what is the best approach. ...
Read | 2007-08-21 11:23 | 4 comment(s)
Extreme 2007—day 2
The first talk I attended on day 2 was Patrick Durusau on Retiring your metadata shoehorn, which is really about a proposal for a more powerful metadata mechanism for ODF. As far as I can tell, what they've done is to extend the ODF schema, particularly IDs on lots of elements that did not have these before. They've also added more elements reminiscent of RDF/a, which they call "in-content metadata", for much the same purpose as that filled by RDF/a. ...
Read | 2007-08-08 16:04 | 1 comment(s)
Extreme 2007—day 1
Extreme Markup languages is a rather unusual conference, with an extremely technical focus, and an unusual mix of the theoretic and pragmatic. The sole criterion for getting on the program seems to be that the speaker must have something interesting to say, which is also unusual, but does, strangely enough, seem to produce excellent results. This is, I think, my fifth Extreme conference, which speaks for itself. ...
Read | 2007-08-08 16:02 | 8 comment(s)
ISO meeting in Montréal
The second ISO meeting of 2007 was held over three days in Montréal, Canada, in conjunction with the Extreme Markup conference. This is a short personal report from the meeting. The meeting was held at McGill University, in the centre for religious studies, which (as you can see) has a rather unusual building. ...
Read | 2007-08-07 16:58 | 0 comment(s)
Subtyping statements
Subtyping topic types has been supported in Topic Maps ever since the beginning, but support for subtyping statement types is much spottier, and, it turns out, trickier. In essence, subtyping of statements follows the same three rules as subtyping of topics. (You may find my introduction to subtyping useful if you don't know which three rules I mean.) There are, however, some quirks. ...
Read | 2007-07-13 18:50 | 0 comment(s)
A first GTM level 1 proposal
ISO has been working on creating a graphical notation for Topic Maps for some time now, and now the first proposal for level 1 has been published. (Level 1 is the ontology part; there is also a level 0, which is the instance part.) This is not a formal draft, just a simple slide show explaining the formalism, so it should be easy to read for anyone who's interested. This is the first step towards creating a standard, just coming up with something so people can say whether they like it or not. If the community approves it can be taken forward and a proper draft made; if the community does not approve a different proposal will have to be put together. ...
Read | 2007-07-05 10:37 | 2 comment(s)
Synonyms in Topic Maps
Understanding how to represent synonyms in Topic Maps is not trivial, and the discussion of it highlights some interesting things about the semantics built in to Topic Maps, so I think it's worth having a look at this pattern. Let's say we want to create a topic for the city of Lviv, which is also known as Lvov. It has a few more names, but we'll pass over those for now. In his Master's Thesis Roy Lachica listed three different ways to do this, and we'll go through them one by one. ...
Read | 2007-06-07 20:48 | 3 comment(s)
7 tips on writing clean code
My job has required me to read quite a bit of code written by other people, and over the years I've found that there are some problems that tend to recur again and again. The idea with this blog entry is to write up some tips on this once and for all, in the hope that it can help people out there who struggle to write clean code. ...
Read | 2007-05-03 13:34 | 62 comment(s)
Topic Maps 2007
This year the Norwegian Topic Maps conference for the first time went international. The timing was really poor for me personally, unfortunately. We finalized the formalities of the acquisition of Ontopia by Bouvet two weeks before the conference, moved office the Friday before the conference, and then I spent most of the conference week discussing the acquisition with partners and customers. Then I had one week in the office, before leaving for three weeks of holiday in Japan. If you've been wondering why this blog has been quiet after posting #100, this is the reason. ...
Read | 2007-04-28 13:27 | 0 comment(s)
