GTM Updates

Lars Marius Garshol has updated the GTM homepage with 3 recent presentations.

CXTM Test Suite 0.1

Lars Marius Garshol announced that "We now finally have a release of the first version of the CXTM-based test suite for Topic Maps engines. It consists of 293 tests using four different syntaxes: XTM 2.0, CTM, LTM 1.3, and TM/XML. The tests have been verified using two different Topic Maps engines (OKS and tinyTIM), and should be reasonably reliable even at this early stage."

Perl TM now supports XTM

Robert Barta has added XTM support to Perl TM now at version 1.41.

"During the last days I have added - without much enthusiasm, mind you - XTM support, for versions 1.0, 2.0 (and the intermediate 1.1). Especially 1.0 is cumbersome programming. Let's thank the XTM editors for the much simpler version 2. Support means deserialization and serialization, so you should be able to create valid XML instances in all the above flavors."

TMPlusPlus Beta

Inge Henriksen announced the release of his open source C++ Topic Maps engine. It has bindings for lots of scripting languages:

"My first main goal with this new engine was to enable C++ programmers (the same programming language in which TM++ is written) to be able to use topic maps in their programs. The second goal was to make a really fast topic maps engine without having to fall back on caching and the likes. The engine is based around TMDM 1.0, and you can also work with XTM 1.0 and XTM 2.0 files."

Topic Maps and All That blog

Steve Pepper has a blog about Topic Maps and related things: "I shall be using this blog to talk about the things that matter to me, the things I believe in, and to criticize the things I think need criticizing."

New CXTM Draft

CXTM has a new home.

Meronymy blog

Inge Henriksen has a new blog dealing with Topic Map issues.

A Topincs Store about Topic Maps

Robert Cerny announced "a Topincs Store about Topic Maps. This
repository aims to support newcomers as well as long time community
members to gain a concise picture of this community and its efforts and
to help them find information about Topic Maps."

Topic Maps 2008 - program now available

The programme for the Topic Maps users Conference in Oslo has been announced. The conference is being held in Oslo between 2-4 April 2008 and the theme is "Towards the Vision of Subject-Centric Computing".

Italian Web Site

Giuliano Vivanet announced the first website deicated to Topic Maps in Italian.

"In fact, there are not many italian resources about this standard. Thus,
TMXTM.it is intended to introduce italian users to the Topic Maps paradigm.
It will provide an introduction (not too technical because I come from a
pedagogical background!!!) to the ISO 13250 standard, especially the Data
Model, its history and key elements, and a guide to the web resources available
(weblinks, tutorials, examples, conferences, ecc.)"

Italian Topic Maps Terminology

Salvatore Vassallo has written a draft of an Italian translation of the Topic Maps Glossary.

Gene Ontology Topic Map

The Wandora project have converted the Gene Ontology (public domain) into a Topic Map.

Topic Maps Snippets blog

There's a new Topic Maps blog providing "news and links from the world of Topic Maps". It is written by the topic mappers at Bouvet (Ontopia) and appears to be very current and relevant.

AToMS (Asian Topic Maps Summit) 2007

Steve Pepper announced that AToMS 2007 is to be held in Kyoto on December 12th, 2007.

"Do you live in East or South-East Asia, especially Japan, Korea,
China, Taiwan, or the Philippines? If so, I urge you to attend AToMS 2007 in Kyoto on December 12th. It will be an excellent opportunity to learn more about Topic Maps
and to network with Asian users and international experts."

PS. Slides of talks are avilable on the site.

A new release of the TM4L Editor

Darina Dicheva announced that a new version of TM4L is available.

TM4L is an e-learning environment providing authoring and browsing support for creating ontology-based learning content and/or structuring digital repositories. TM4L utilizes topic map-based overlay structures that encode domain knowledge and connect it to (learning) resources, which are considered relevant to a specific domain. Its interface is translated into 9 languages including Spanish, German, French, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, Danish, Bulgarian, and Nepali.

The features added recently to TM4L include:
- topic map querying capabilities
- visual topic maps editing
- conversion between topic maps and RDF data
- plug-in architecture enabling users to add new features

Balisage: The Markup Conference

Jim Mason tells us to mark our calendars:

Balisage: The Markup Conference
August 12 - 15, 2008
(workshop: August 11, 2008)

Balisage is designed to meet the needs of markup theoreticians and practitioners who are pushing the boundaries of the field. It's all about the markup: how to create it; what it means; hierarchies and overlap; modeling; taxonomies; transformation; query, searching, and retrieval; presentation and accessibility; making systems that make markup dance (or dance faster to a different tune in a smaller space) - in short, changing the world and the web through the power of marked-up information.

Wordnet converted to a Topic Map

Aki Kivela announced that an RDF version of Wordnet has been converted to a Topic Map by Wandora. Now there is a nice data set to load into your engines. "we have converted the WordNet to a topic map. Topic map is in XTM format. Wandora project file is also available."

New ISO Drafts

A number of drafts were recently published.

Dublin Core in Topic Maps
http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0884.htm

A GTM level 1 proposal
http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0882.pdf
http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/113.html

ISO 13250-1: Topic Maps -- Overview and Basic Concepts
http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0877.zip

TMDM -> TMRM mapping
http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0879.pdf

CTM (Compact syntax for Topic Maps)
http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0880.htm

TMQL
http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0887.pdf

Press release: Ontopia acquired by Bouvet

Oslo, 16 March 2007

Ontopia and Bouvet announce that Bouvet has acquired all shares in Ontopia. Bouvet is a Norwegian consulting house of more than 300 consultants, which has had a strong focus on Topic Maps for a number of years. Today Bouvet has around 40 consultants building Topic Maps-based solutions. According to the sales agreement, Bouvet acquires all of Ontopia's employees, partners, and customers, as well as the Ontopia Knowledge Suite (OKS). The move further strengthens Bouvet's Topic Maps focus.

Bouvet has over the past few years built Norway's leading consulting team on Topic Maps, and has developed more than 40 solutions for customers like Norway Post, the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, and the Norwegian Consumers' Council. Last month saw the launch of both the citizen's portal for the city of Bergen, Norway's second largest city, and TheGovernment.no. Both launches have received wide media coverage.

Ontopia and Bouvet have had a close partnership over many years, and together delivered solutions like Kulturnett.no (Norwegian cultural portal) and the city of Bergen portal. The acquisition makes Ontopia part of a much larger entity, with the resources to take the Ontopia vision forward.

"Getting Ontopia's deep Topic Maps competence on board at Bouvet is very exciting for us. It strengthens our ambition to deliver a broad range of Topic Maps-based solutions. Given today's focus on semantic standards the timing is perfect," says Ole-Jørgen Tallaksrud, head of business development at Bouvet.

"We were looking for alternative ways to grow, and found Bouvet to be the most attractive option. Bouvet's broad competence complements our own narrower focus very well," says Ontopia's CTO Lars Marius Garshol. "We believe we can achieve much more as part of Bouvet than we were able to on our own."

"Ontopia has played a decisive role in establishing Topic Maps as an important technology, both in Norway and internationally," comments Steve Pepper. Steve has been chair of Ontopia's board until the acquisition. "I'm delighted that Bouvet, with their competence and professionalism, now take over this inheritance and carry it forward."

For more information, please contact:

Ole-Jørgen Tallaksrud, Bouvet, head of business development.
Email: Phone: +47 91 36 18 89

Lars Marius Garshol, CTO of Ontopia until the acquisition.
Email: Phone: +47 98 21 55 50

Sverre Hurum, Bouvet, CEO, Bouvet.
Email: Phone: +47 23 40 60 00

Fuzzzy - Social Topic Mapping

Hey, hey - this one looks interesting: tagging with relationships. Roy Lachica announced the release of his soical topicmapping website - Fuzzzy. "The system is a web2.0 social bookmarking site using the TMCore Topic Map engine. The tags used to categorize bookmarks are topics within a shared Topic Map and topics with associations are created by the users." Find out more.

Welcome to Topic Maps 2007

The programme for the Topic Maps User Conference was announced.

"We are very happy with the program, which has 24 presentations on the
conference day in three parallel tracks. It is an international
conference in more than name. There will be people of more than 10
different nationalities giving presentations. – Are you up to date on
Topic Mapping in Finland, Korea or Nepal?"

Autonomous Topic Maps

Lutz Maicher has developed the concept of Autonomous Topic Maps: "These are topic maps containing workflow definitions. The execution of these workflows produces new topic maps according to the modelling method defined by the workflows. Broadcasting your Autonomous Topic Maps scales the omnipresence production of new topic maps according to the construction plans you have designed and you want to establish."

Tags
topicmaps
autonomoustopicmaps

Topic Maps 2007

Topic Maps 2007 - The First International Topic Maps Users Conference
Hosted by the Norwegian Computer Society. Co-sponsored by OASIS.

Building on four years of successful Topic Maps conferences in Oslo,
the Norwegian Computer Society, in conjunction with OASIS, is proud
to announce Topic Maps 2007, the First International Topic Maps Users
Conference.

Oslo, Norway. 20-21 March 2007

An implementation of PHPTMAPI

"The initial (alpha) release of an implementation of the PHPTMAPI
core interfaces can be downloaded now from sourceforge."

Wandora released

Aki Kivela proudly announces the relase of Wandora, a "knowledge extraction, management and publishing environment based on topic maps... Wandora is a Java application similar to Protege and TM4L but the way of use is more WWW browser alike. Wandora's topic map model is little limited compared to the standard but has some very interesting features such as layered topic maps and RDF import. Wandora also supports SQL database storage of topic maps."

Tags
topicmaps
wandora
java

Topic Map Web Services

Graham Moore, after a bit of prompting from Stefan Lischke, encourages people to get involved with s single approach to TM web services.

"I plan to post a straw man proposal that tries to capture the powerful aspects of the different services I have been exposed to (such as, TMCore TMWS, TMRAP, RDFNet API, SNAPI, the work by Robert Barta and that of Robert Cerny)... I will post the SF project link as soon as the nice people there let me have it. Let's go do it!"

PS. It appears that the project at SourceForge is TMWSI. Not much there as yet.

Tags
topicmaps
webservices
tmcore
tmws
tmrap
rdfnetapi
snapi

Graphical Notation for Topic Maps (GTM)

Inge Henriksen has made a suggestion for Graphical Notation for Topic Maps.

Tags
topicmaps
gtm

New draft of CTM

The Editors of CTM have published a new draft of the Compact Topic Maps Syntax in preparation for the Leipzig meeting.

Tags
topicmaps
ctm

TMAPIX 0.1 released

Lars Heuer announces the release of some Java libs to make working with TMAPI more comfortable. "TMAPIX contains packages to build and filter Topic Maps constructs; additionally several utility classes are provided."

Tags
topicmaps
tmapi
tmapix

TMDM and XTM2.0 finalized

Lars Marius Garshol announces the (almost) fruition of 5 to 6 years of work. Well done!

Tags
topicmaps
xtm
tmdm

PHPTMAPI released

Johannes Schmidt has announced the release of PHPTMAPI. "PHPTMAPI is released and can be downloaded now from sourceforge [1]. Beside the source and the documentation of the API there are also UML class diagrams available. A guide (install/use, appending helper objects etc.) will follow. Ideas, suggestions, annotations and support (implementation) are welcome!"

Tags
topicmaps
tmapi
phptmapi

Topincs - Topic Maps authoring and storing

Robert Cerny announced the release of Topincs, a Topic Map authoring tool. "It's biggest asset is, that a group of people can collaboratively create a Topic Map over a set of computers that are able to communicate over HTTP, one of them acting as a server. It makes excessive use of technologies, now popular under the buzzword AJAX. The "web page" is loaded only once, all other communication with the server is invisible. It uses a database with a schema according to the Topic Maps Data Model for storage and uses a format, i call JTM for (JSON Topic Maps), which is perfect in a web browser environment and basically just an object notation of the TMDM. For more on JSON, the fat-free alternative to XML, visit json.org. Topincs uses the HTTP protocol how it was originally intended in a RESTful way, thus taking advantage of the free goodies, authorization/authentication, caching and the optional security."

Tags
topicmaps
rest
apache
json
jtm
ajax
php
mysql

CTM has been approved as a work item at ISO

The document with the requirements have posted in the repository.

Tags
topicmaps
ctm

Apply Topic Maps to Applications

Another Kal Ahmed and Graham Moore article has been published on the Microsoft Architecture web site. It discusses "some of the current and potential application areas for topic maps. As topic maps are primarily of use when integrated with other systems."

Tags
topicmaps
microsoft

New version of TM4L

"Among the new features is the translation of the TM4L Editor interface
in a couple of languages including Chinese (Taiwan), Japanese, French,
and Nepali. The translation into Japanese, French and Nepali was
provided by the National Institute of Informatics, Japan, and the
translation into Chinese (Taiwan) by the National Chiao Tung University,
Taiwan."

Tags
topicmaps
tm4l

Guidelines for RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability

Steve Pepper has announced the first draft for review by the SWBPD Working Group and the ISO Topic Maps Working Group.

Tags
topicmaps
rdf
w3c

TMRA 06

TMRA is on again - October 11-12th 2006, Leipzig, DE. "TMRA – the annual conference series on Topic Maps Research and Applications - is a scientific and industrial forum whose main object is connecting the key players in the Topic Maps community. Here you will find researchers, users in government and industry, as well as the vendors, the luminaries, and the standards creators gathered for an exchange of
ideas in a stimulating setting. TMRA is where new challenges in Topic Maps are
identified and open issues tackled."

Tags
topicmaps
conference
tmra

Ontopia releases Ontopoly topic map editor with OKS 3.0

"OSLO, NORWAY, 19 JANUARY 2006: Ontopoly, the new web-based tool for
creating, populating and managing corporate ontologies, is now
available as part of the Ontopia Knowledge Suite (OKS) 3.0 release and the OKS
Samplers free download. This latest addition to the OKS significantly lowers
the bar for developing and maintaining ontologies, even for first-time users."

Tags
topicmaps
ontopoly
ontopia
oks

Electric Forest blog

I've been a bit slow to catch onto Electric Forest - a blog contributed to by a number of topic mappers. It contains "thoughts about books, digital libraries, and technologies related to expressing and keeping track of our thoughts..."

Tags
topicmaps
blog
library

TM/XML

Lars Marius Garshol has written a blog entry on a new XML format for Topic Maps. "The best way to think of TM/XML is as a kind of LTM-in-XML, in the sense that like LTM is more human-friendly than XTM, and also like LTM it is not in any way standardized. It's just a proposal, to be implemented in Ontopia software, which anyone else can implement if they want to."

Tags
topicmaps

PHPTMAPI

Version 0.1 of PHPTMAPI has been released. "Common Topic Map Application Programming Interface for PHP PHPTMAPI implements a PHP API for manipulating topic maps, based on the TMAPI project."

Tags
topicmaps
tmapi
phptmapi

An Introduction to Topic Maps

An article by Kal Ahmed and Graham Moore has been published at microsoft.com. "This article introduces the ISO international standard Topic Maps. The topic maps paradigm describes a way in which complex relationships between abstract concepts and real-world resources can be described and interchanged using a standard XML syntax."

Tags
topicmaps
microsoft

TMAPI for PHP 0.1

Espen Holge announced the release of TMAPI/PHP today: "TMAPI/PHP will implement an API for PHP based on the TMAPI (www.tmapi.org) project. This API will enable PHP developers easy and standarized implementation of topic maps in their applications."

Tags
topicmaps
tmapi
php
phptmapi

O4E (Ontologies for Education) Portal

The O4E portal is a collaborative project between Winston-Salem State
University, University of Pittsburgh and Saint-Petersburg State
Polytechnic University. The main goal of the project is to collect and
disseminate web resources in the field of application of ontologies and
relevant technologies for the modern educational perspectives.

Tags
topicmaps
portal
o4e
ontology

TMRA'05 slides published

The slides for the various presentations at TMRA05 have now been published.

Tags
topicmaps
tmra05

YALTM ("YALTM Ain't LTM")

This has to get the award for the most messed up abbreviation: not only is it recursive but it contains 2 others. Well done. Anyway... Rich Morin created YALTM as a YAML extension to LTM. I can't find any other references to it apart from this initial mailing list post...

Tags
topicmaps
yaltm
ltm
yaml

CTM Use Cases

Gabriel Hopmans, Sam Oh and Lars Heuer have published some uses cases to evaluate the various text notations for Topic Maps. Here are the solutions.

Tags
topicmaps
ctm

Topic Maps for Libraries

Suellen Stringer-Hye has announced the creation of the Topic Maps for Libraries wiki. As it currently stands the site provides links to basic Topic Maps resources.

Tags
topicmaps
wiki

XTM is not Topic Maps

Lars Marius Garshol makes his case that XTM is not Topic Maps, ie. the syntax is not the same as the data model. This will be a familiar argument to those who read the TM mailing lists.

Tags
topicmaps
tmdm
xtm

TMRA'05 summary

Lars Marius Garshol has posted a great summary of TMRA'05 (day 1, day 2) for all of those unable to make it to Leipzig - like those of us living in Australia! The range of papers at this conference was very impressive and Lars does a good job of covering them.

Tags
topicmaps
tmra05

TMWiki

There's a new Topic Maps wiki on the block - TMWiki. It's maintained (in part :) by Hendrik Thomas. He encourages you to contribute. "TMwiki is a Topic Map Wiki application based on Dokuwiki. It enables the collaborated authoring of Topic Map. Also I developed TMV (Topic Map Visualiser) a generic graphical Topic Map browser. It is used in TMwiki as a display and navigation interface for Topic Maps."

Tags
topicmaps
tmwiki
wiki

Australasian Ontology Workshop

Anne Cregan has announced that the deadline for the Australasian Ontology Workshop has been extended until Sept 9. The worksphop is being help in Sydney, Australia in December. "In recent years there has been a worldwide increase in the use of ontologies, both in industry and in research laboratories. There is a growing community of researchers in Australia and New Zealand, working on various aspects of ontologies. The primary aim of this workshop is to bring together ontology researchers in the region."

Tags
topicmaps
conference
sydney

TM4L Release

A new versin of TM4L has been released. It includes built-in visualization capabilities and the initial set of Dublin Core elements now use standard PSIs.

Tags
topicmaps
tm4l

bibMap - the Topic Maps Technologies

Lutz Maicher announced the publishing of bibMap, which is "is a Topic Map in ltm-format which documents the current status ofthe literature in Topic Maps research."

Tags
topicmaps
bibMap
ltm
bibliography

Q Model

Lars Marius Garshol has published his paper on the Q Model, "which is a formal model which can represent both Topic Maps and RDF, and moreover create structurally near-identical representations for both."

Tags
topicmaps
q
model

www.topicmaps.com

Lars Marius Garshol updates us on the current thinking on the topicmaps.com domain: "It was felt that since we are creating psi.topicmaps.com most people are likely to assume that there will be some content at www.topicmaps.com, and in any case it might be useful to have a "home site" for the topic maps community." That doesn't mean you have to stop coming to topicmap.com though.

Tags
topicmaps

PSIs for ISO 8601 dates

Lars Heuer of Segmia has published some PSIs for ISO 8601 and datetimes.

Tags
topicmaps
segmia
iso8601

TMRA'05 - International Workshop on TMs

Woohoo! Robert Barta told us that the TMRA'05 programme has been published. The list of presentations looks very impressive. It's good to see that a varied range of presentations from a variety of contributors. The same can be said of Extreme as well.

Tags
topicmaps
tmra

New Versavant Release

A new version of Versavant has been released. Changes include: "integrated/added: 'BigAssert' 'TRA_assert' 'A_assert' and 'U_assert' subject map patterns (aka TMAs or Topic Map Applications or subject map disclosures)".

Tags
topicmaps
versavant