Lost and found
I thought my holiday photos were lost forever, when suddenly it occurred to me that there was a way to get them back. I was reading a local IT newspaper in the office kitchen, waiting for my tea water to boil, when I spotted an ad for Ibas. Ibas is a Norwegian company specializing in data recovery. I mostly associate them with really spectacular recovery operations after fires and shipwrecks, and so on. However, the ad said they also did this for private individuals who had lost their digital photos. ...
Read | 2006-11-17 21:08 | 4 comment(s)
Some basic Topic Maps terminology
There are some simple, common terminological mistakes people tend to make when they first encounter Topic Maps, and I thought it might be useful to write up a simple guide to help people. ...
Read | 2006-11-14 19:19 | 0 comment(s)
Ontologies: validation or reasoning
Information about the structure of an ontology can be used for two different purposes: either for validation or for reasoning, and this is a distinction that it seems most people are not aware of yet. I'll try to clear up the confusion in this blog posting, as best I can. ...
Read | 2006-10-15 19:37 | 2 comment(s)
ISO meeting in Leipzig
Since nearly all the key people in the ISO committee were going to be in Leipzig anyway for TMRA 2006 it was decided to have an ISO meeting in conjunction with the conference. The meeting started the Friday after the conference, and continued for three days, finishing on Sunday. ...
Read | 2006-10-15 17:57 | 3 comment(s)
TMRA 2006 — day 2
Day two started right off with two parallel tracks, and I went to the track on "Portals and Information Retrieval", where the first speaker was Sam Oh. He has done a study where they built a Topic Maps-based portal to Korean folk music (known as Pansouri) with a quite detailed ontology of the domain. They then compared how easy it was for 20 test subjects to find information in the traditional portal and the new Topic Maps-based one. 10 subjects used the traditional one first, then the Topic Maps one afterwards, and the remaining 10 did it the other way around. They tested both objective measures (how many steps to find information on 6 assigned search tasks), and subjective measures (how did the test subjects feel about the portals). ...
Read | 2006-10-12 09:09 | 4 comment(s)
TMRA 2006 — day 1
Like last year, I will try to do a semi-live blog report from the TMRA 2006 conference on Topic Maps in Leipzig. This year the conference is in the Campus Villa Ida, which was finished just two weeks ago. TMRA is actually the first conference that is held in this shiny new conference center. (So far everything seems to be working smoothly. This is, after all, Germany.) ...
Read | 2006-10-11 09:20 | 2 comment(s)
Meeting on ontology modelling
Today there was another meeting of the Topic Maps Users' Group on ontology modelling in Topic Maps. ...
Read | 2006-09-26 20:50 | 2 comment(s)
Teaching Topic Maps in Beijing
As I wrote in an earlier posting I was in Beijing to teach Topic Maps to the developers of a Chinese start-up. The details of their product are secret right now, but the experience of teaching Topic Maps in this environment is quite unique. This posting has been sitting around unpublished for a long time, and I just stumbled over it now, but decided to publish it. ...
Read | 2006-08-20 23:51 | 0 comment(s)
Equivalence classes
I've been doing some thinking about identity lately, but to explain myself I need to first get across the concept of an equivalence class. Equivalence classes for me are one of the wonders of modern mathemathics, in the sense that it's a concept that's brilliantly simple, obvious, and elegant, and at the same time incredibly useful. ...
Read | 2006-08-17 21:23 | 9 comment(s)
Norwegian Topic Maps Users' Group Meeting
The Norwegian Topic Maps Users' Group had one of its irregular meetings tonight, with talks on various subjects, plus updates on the administrivia of the users' group itself. It was of course followed by beer and socializing at a local bar. ...
Read | 2006-08-16 21:43 | 3 comment(s)
