Topic map news
This news pages was superseded by the topicmap.com blog in October 2005. Please refer to the blog for the 'latest' news.
News bites gathered from the various topic map mailing lists.
TMRA'05: Charting the Topic Map Research and Applications Landscape (6-7 Oct 2005)
A conference just for Topic Maps is being held in Leipzig, Germany, 6-7th October 2005. Check out the impressive list of talks. Registration is a very reasonable 130 EUR. Sessions include:
- Introduction to TMRA'05
- Frameworks and Engines
- Topic Maps Exchange
- Modelling and Creating Topic Maps
- Topic Maps Driven Interfaces
- Standards Related Research
- Topic Maps in Library and Cultural Heritage Science
Extreme Markup Languages 2005 (1-5 Aug 2005)
"A peer-reviewed technical conference. An unfettered festival of free-flowing markup. Pointy-brackets, pointed questions, and sharp ideas. Nearly a week of geek speak." There will be 6 paper presented dealing with either Topic Maps or RDF (or both). They're online as well!
www.topicmaps.com (29 Jul 2005)
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 :)
CTM (12 Jul 2005)
At the Amsterdam meeting, SC34 recognized the need for a standard text-based notations for representing Topic Maps. Gabriel Hopmans requested requirements feedback from the TM community. This in turn lead to extensive threads on the appropriateness of CTM's place in the Topic Maps standards.
PSIs for ISO 8601 dates (23 Jul 2005)
Lars Heuer of Segmia has published some PSIs for ISO 8601 and datetimes.
TMRA'05 - International Workshop on TMs (20 Jul 2005)
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.
New Versavant Release (18 Jul 2005)
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)".
New XTM 1.1 draft (15 Jul 2005)
A new XTM 1.1 draft has been published.
New TMRM draft (14 Jul 2005)
A new TMRM draft has been published which integrates T+.
New TMDM draft (13 Jul 2005)
A new TMDM draft is ready for preview for the Mortréal meeting.
Extreme Markup 2005 heads up (2 Jul 2005)
Steve Newcomb has posted a list of the Topic Maps related presentations at Extreme. See the entry above. There lots of great stuff there. Bernard Vatant laments that he won't be there and points us to a paper of his: Tools for semantic interoperability: hubjects.
BigAssert now available in Versavant (20 Jun 2005)
Steve Newcomb has implemented the "big assertion model formerly known as the Topic Maps
Reference Model" as a Subject Map Pattern module for Versavant. Download.
New version of the TM4L Editor (10 Jun 2005)
Darina Dicheva announced a new version of TM4L which includes bug fixes and some new features. Download.
Subject Locators (8 Jun 2005)
Patrick Durusau kicks off a long and interesting (for some) Subject Locators thread on the sc34wg3 mailing list. The thread was based around parts of Thomas Fielding's dissertation concerned with REST.
Visualisation of Topic Maps (6 Jun 2005)
Andreas Fleck posted a summary of possible methods of visualising Topic Maps.
News from the ISO Topic Maps committee (30 May 2005)
The WG3's recommendations from the Amsetrdam meeting have been published. Steve Pepper reports that TMDM and CXTM are very nearly finished.
Topic Maps Interest Group Australasia (29 May 2005)
Alexander Johannesen has established the TMIGA mailing list. "It is an non-profit and free for all interest group that probably wants to put Topic Maps on the Australian, New Zealandian and Asian maps, be it through hearing about current events and movements, or lobbying and pull / push. I hope it can turn into an interesting place for people to share their reified associations."
XTech 2005 (16-19 May 2005)
"XTech 2005 is the premier European conference for developers and managers working with XML and Web technologies, bringing together the worlds of web development, open source, semantic web and open standards." See the schedule.
TMQL Tutorial (Preview) (7 May 2005)
Robert Barta has produced a preview TMQL Tutorial which "may give first insights how a developer will experience and use the language." It will be officially published later.
New TMCL draft (6 May 2005)
Dmitry Bogachev has announced that a new TMCL draft has been posted.
First release of Versavant (3 May 2005)
Steve Newcomb has announced the first release of Versavant (homepage). "It's an implementation of the "Versavant Disclosure Discipline", which is a particular way... to disclose and implement a Topic Map Application. Basically, a TMA disclosure in Versavant is a small set of functions for each property class, and a function for each "conferral rule" (see below). Each of the functions is an instance of a "function class" that Versavant knows when and how to call."
New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (29 Apr 2005)
The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre has relaunched its website based on TM4J. Conal Tuohy reports that "The topic map presently contains 46807 topics, 192492 associations, and 43942 occurrences; roughly 150Mb of XTM. We are using tm4j's "in-memory" back-end, running on Java 1.4.1 on Windows 2000. The topic map consumes approximately 1.3GB of RAM."
TMQL tutorial slides (26 Apr 2005)
Some TMQL tutorial slides have been posted by Lars Marius Garshol. Once again, a good overview. And here are some more TMQL links provided by Robert Barta.
SQL as TM Query Language? No, thanks! (19 Apr 2005)
Robert Barta posted some notes on why he doesn't think SQL cuts it as a query language for Topic Maps.
TMDM/XTM 1.1 review (30 Mar 2005)
Lars Marius Garshol has posted the Norwegian Users' Group review of TMDM and XTM. It provides a good overview of the Topic Map standards.
Perl XTM 0.36 maintenance release (10 Mar 2005)
Robert Barta announced that the Perl XTM distibution now runs under Perl 5.8.4.
RDFTM: Survey of Interoperability Proposals (25 Feb 2005)
Steve Pepper, one of the draft's authors, announced that the RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability Task Force has today posted a complete draft of its first deliverable: RDFTM: Survey of Interoperability Proposals. "The current document is intended to pave the way for a set of Guidelines on how to achieve interoperability between Topic Maps and RDF. Those Guidelines will be the next deliverable of the RDFTM task force."
German Topic Map Mailing List (23 Feb 2005)
Lars Heuer proud to announce a topic map mailinglist for German speakers. "The goal of the mailinglist is to make topic maps more popular in Germany and offer a discussion forum beginners and experts."
TMAPI 1.0 SP1 (23 Feb 2005)
Some bug fixes and improvements but no api changes have been made to TMAPI.
TMQL working draft has been published (20 Feb 2005)
Lars Marius Garshol has announced that the first Topic Maps Query Language working draft has been published.
New release of ATop (8 Feb 2005)
ATop, a topic map editor, has a new release which allows connection to Ozone and execution of tolog rules.
TMAPI Tutorial at XML.com (8 Feb 2005)
Stephan Lischke announced that a TMAPI tutorial written by Robert Barta and Oliver Leimig is now online.
TMRQL (28 Jan 2005)
Networked Planet have published a document describing TMRQL "to be taken as input from Networked Planet Limited into the ISO TMQL standardisation process."
Final Committee Drafts of TMDM and XTM 1.1 (25 Jan 2005)
ISO has just published Final Committee Drafts of TMDM and XTM 1.1.
International Workshop on Topic Map Research and Applications (20 Jan 2005)
Murray Altheim announced a call for papers for TMRA'05 which will be held in Villa Ida, Leipzig, Germany, 6-7th October 2005. "TMRA'05 ... provides a forum for community building in the field of Topic Map research and applications. A main objective of TMRA'05 is to chart the landscape of Topic Map research. Together we want to identify the primary open issues, who is working on what, bring together researchers and application pioneers, stimulate the systematic tackling of such issues, and foster the exchange of ideas in a non-commercial and stimulating setting. Besides the scientific track, open-space sessions are foreseen as playgrounds for visionaries."
Semagia TMAPI Utils (12 Jan 2005)
Lars Heuer, an active contributor to TMAPI, has released a simple Java package, TMAPI-Utils, "that simplifies the working with the TMAPI index classes and offers methods for common object lookups."
Networked Planet (11 Jan 2005)
A new vendor has emerged - NewtworkedPlanet. Kal Ahmed and Graham Moore have joined forces to start a Topic Map company based on the .Net platform. "Networked Planet is pleased to announce the imminent availability of TMCore05, a Topic Map Engine for the .NET platform. TMCore05 has been designed as a toolkit to enable developers on the Microsoft .NET platform to create scalable topic map applications with robust persistent storage and full support for a multi-user environment. The engine supports the full range of the ISO standard Topic Maps specification and also provides a flexible web services API and easily-processed XML syntax to enable rapid application development and flexible deployment in a .NET environment.
Topic Maps for eLearning (23 Dec 2004)
The Topic Maps for eLearning project has released TM4L, a Topic Map editor. A trial version is available to download.
LTM 1.3 Change Proposal (18 Dec 2004)
Ontopia is seeking comments for a new version of LTM.
TM4J 0.9.8 Released (15 Dec 2004)
TM4J 0.9.8 is a maintenance release.
Ceryle (7 Dec 2004)
Murray Altheim has released Ceryle which "is a free tool to help you get organized. If you use a lot of post it notes, are a writer, journalist, researcher, student, or anyone compiling a lot of information for a project, maybe just trying to organize your recipes, bookmarks, or your MP3 collection, Ceryle is designed to assist you in keeping track of things. Ceryle includes features to help you store, find and even visualize your information, using what is called a graph visualization."
Searching Smarter, Not Harder (30 Nov 2004)
Topic Maps get a run in Wired!
XTche: Schema language for Topic Maps (21 Nov 2004)
Schema language published by The University of Minho and presented at XML 2004. It is part of the PhD thesis of Giovani Rubert Librelotto and is based on XML Schema syntax.
TMDM/XTM meeting (18 Nov 2004)
The notes from the TMDM/XTM meeting in DC have now been posted
TMQL Tutorial (18 Nov 2004)
Tutorial for the Washington meeting on 14 Nov 2004.
Semantic Publish/Subscribe Web Service proposal (17 Nov 2004)
Stefan Lischke has published a Semantic Publish/Subscribe Web Service proposal.
xtm2xhtml (17 Nov 2004)
xtm2xhtml does what it says on the box.
ATop Editor (12 Nov 2004)
Early binary of ATop has been released.
New Reference Model Draft (9 Nov 2004)
A new working draft of 13250-5, "Topic Maps - Reference Model" is now available.
CXTM Updated (2 Nov 2004)
An updated draft of the CXTM specification is now available.
New version of TMCL Requirements and Use Cases & Specification (25 Oct 2004)
New version of TMCL Requirements and Use Cases & Specification has been released.
tinyTIM updated (22 Oct 2004)
tinyTIM supports TMAPI 1.0.
TMAPI 1.0 Released (21 Oct 2004)
"The TMAPI team has released the TMAPI 1.0 final. The goal of TMAPI is to allow developers to learn and use just one programming API for work with any topic map processing engine."
TM4J 0.9.7 Released (8 Oct 2004)
TM4J 0.9.7 supports TMAPI 1.0.
Topic Map Explorer (6 Sep 2004)
A new desktop application, the Topic Map Explorer, "that provides a single, unified and structured way to organize, classify, find and share information" has been released by Semantic Web Technologies. There was some criticism of the product on the topicmapmail list for not being a conforming Topic Map Application and that the title of the product could be considered misleading.
univers immedia blog (1 Sep 2004)
A new blog discussing "how to achieve 'subject identification' in a distributed network".
Merging of Distributed Topic Maps based on the Subject Identity Measure (SIM) Approach (1 Sep 2004)
Lutz Maicher has published his paper on merging TMs. "We adress with this paper the question how distributed topic maps can be merged if the subjects of their topics aren't described by a centralised vocabulary (PSIs). We developed a (lightweighted) approach wich yields for our example set very good results."
Slides from Montreal (25 Aug 2004)
Lars Marius Garshol has posted some slides from the Montreal meeting.
Nary relations on the semantic web (5 Aug 2004)
New W3C Working draft: Defining N-ary Relations on the Semantic Web: Use With Individuals. "In Semantic Web languages, such as RDF and OWL, a property is a binary relation; that is, it links two individuals or an individual and a value. How do we represent relations among more than two individuals? How do we represent properties of a relation, such as our certainty about it, severity or strength of a relation, relevance of a relation, and so on? The document presents ontology patterns for representing n-ary relations and discusses what users must consider when choosing these patterns." Bernard Vatant has prepared a draft annex dealing with representation of n-ary relations in Topic Maps.
TMAPI Utils (1 Aug 2004)
tinyTIM XTM parser/serialiser has been placed into TMAPI Utils, a new project at SourceForge.
TMNav 0.2.8 and Panckoucke 0.3.1 (30 Jul 2004)
"TMNav 0.2.8 and Panckoucke 0.3.1 are now available for download from SourceForge."
PhotoGraph: A clever name for a clever site (30 Jun 2004)
Stefan Lischke has produced PhotoGraph, a website where photos have been annotated with a topic map. "Its a simple TopicMap with persons, photos, locations, events, objects, actions and objects topics and taken-at and depicted-in assocs... The Applet, which is a modified HyperGraph[1] which uses my tinyTIM[2] as
TopicMap enigne, shows a Fragment with a depth of 2 "around" the shown
topic."
TM4J 0.95 Released (28 Jun 2004)
TM4J 0.95 now has support for tolog 1.0.
Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web (5 Jun2004)
Thomas B. Passin has announced the upcoming release of his new book publiched by Manning. The book is about the nature of the semantic web - what the devil do people think it is supposed to be anyway? - and about the technologies that will be needed to make it happen. What kinds of technologies willbe needed, how much is in existence now, how will they work together, what are their strengths and pitfalls ...? There is an entire chapter on Topic Maps, and another on RDF, the two together standing for the domain of knowledge representation.
TM4J 0.94 Released (7 May 2004)
TM4J 0.94 updated. "TMAPI support updated to TMAPI 1.0 beta release."
TMAPI 1.0 beta release (6 May 2004)
The TMAPI team are proud to announce the release of TMAPI 1.0 beta. TMAPI is an effort to create a standard, open application programming interface (API) to systems which provide and/or manage topic maps.
TM Editor (26 Apr 2004)
George Tryfon announced the availablity of a free topic map editor from the TA-KT research group. It is now called Atop. "This Topic Map Editor is implemented in Java as a module under NetBeans 3.6."
Extreme Markup Languages Conference 2004 (2 Aug 2004)
"At Extreme Markup Languages software developers, tag set designers, librarians, computer scientists, linguists, markup theorists, taxonomists, publishers, lexicographers, typographers, and other XML bricklayers and pipefitters devote the better part of a week to discussing questions like: Will RDF or Topic Maps ever take off? ... How does a Topic Map mean?" The conference will be held in Montréal, Canada.
XML Europe 2004 (18 Apr 2004)
Once again XML Europe has quite a few Topic Map presentations, especially in the Knowledge Technolgies Track. The conference will be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
TMAPI support (13 Apr 2004)
Two TMAPI announcements only three days after the initial release of the interfaces. TM4J supports the interfaces, as does tinyTIM.
TM Visualisation (12 Apr 2004)
Jens Kanschik has extended the HyperGraph homepage with a section about TM visualisation which uses tinyTIM as an engine in conjunction with HyperGraph.
TMAPI 1.0 alpha release (10 Apr 2004)
Kal Ahmed has announced the first major public release of TMAPI. "TMAPI is a proposed common programming interface for topic map processors. The goal of TMAPI is to allow developers to learn and use just one programming API for work with any topic map processing engine -
improving code portability and reducing learning curve. TMAPI is public domain software free from any restriction on its use."
CXTM Test Suite Project (20 Mar 2004)
There's a new project at SourceForge "to develop a suite of test files for topic map processors using CXTM."
Topic Map Editor (10 Mar 2004)
TA-KT research group is developing a Topic Map Editor on top of TM4J.
TM Use Case Solutions (5 Mar 2004)
An interesting comparison of the various TMQL use case solutions: AsTMa?, TMPath, Toma, tolog.
TM4J 0.9 Released (28 Feb 2004)
TM4J 0.9 "includes a number of significant changes and performance enhancements"
Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group (25 Feb 2004)
New W3C working group Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment "is focused on providing consensus-based guidance - including practical deployment recommendations, engineering guidelines, ontology / vocabulary development practices, educational material and effective demonstrations, designed to facilitate Semantic Web deployment." Bernard Vatant is a registered as a participating member of this WG.
Topic Map Wiki (24 Feb 2004)
It seems that it is time for a Topic Map Wiki - a Wiki which can support RDF/TM constructs. Wikis have been amazingly successful because of the ease with which it is possible to write on a subject and then to hyperlink the subjects. However, they lack the ability to type these links. A Wiki which supported a syntax which allowed the object, predicate and subject of a triple to be represented by pages in the Wiki would be a very powerful system indeed. The proposal at Topiki seems to be built on similar ideas. I have also just seen Platypus Wiki in my travels
tinyTIM - a tiny TMAPI implementation (18 Feb 2004)
"tinyTIM is a very small easy to use (50kb jarsize) in memory Topic Map engine. It implements the TMAPI interfaces, so one can work with TopicMaps via the TMAPI standard. TMAPI will be what DOM is for XML."
Toma (17 Feb 2004)
Rani Pinchuk has put Toma forward as a TMQL suggestion.
ZTM (2 Feb 2004)
The Zope Topic Map System "aims to enable distributed development and maintenance of 'topic map'-driven 'semantic' web sites by handling data model information items derived from the ISO 13250 and XTM 1.0 as managed content under Zope CMF."
Draft XTM Mime Type (29 Jan 2004)
The latest version of the Draft XTM Mime Type document has been put online.
TM Nav 0.2.7 alpha 1 (17 Jan 2004)
The TM4J Project is pleased to announce a new release (0.2.7 alpha) of TMNav (Documentation). The goal of the TMNav project is to provide an intuitive graphical interface for topicmap navigation. TMNav relies on TM4J as it's underlying topicmap engine."
SNS Web Services (15 Jan 2004)
Thomas Bandholtz has been running a TM Web Service since Summer 2003 called SNS Web Services.
SNAPI (14 Jan 2004)
The Semantic Network API (SNAPI) project was mentioned on the topicmapmail mailing list. The SourceForge admins currently are Graham Moore and Thomas Schwotzer. SNAPI is a "Remote API for Knowledge Access and Update. A C# and Java API designed to provide remote access to semantic web knowledge stores such as RDF and Topic Maps."
Web Services (13 Jan 2003)
An interesting thread kicked of on the topicmapmail mailing list. A couple of projects that are underway were mentioned as well as different approaches that could be taken to web services: REST vs SOAP etc.
Panckoucke Released (6 Jan 2004)
The TM4J Project has announced the initial release of which "is a java library to support the developement of topic map presentation and navigation tools. Panckoucke is a subproject of tm4j and relies on it as its underlying topicmap engine. It integrates tmharvest, another subproject of tm4j, to support the automated creation of topic maps from structured data. Panckoucke is free and open-source (under the Apache Software Foundation license).
Thinkgraph 0.2.52 Released (31 Dec 2003)
Michel Kern has announced the new release Thinkgraph 0.2.52. "ThinkGraph is a mix between a MindMapping appplication
(structured display of informations) and a 2D drawing application."
OKS2 and Omnigator 007 (29 Dec 2003)
Ontopia have announced the release of a new version of their TM Software: OKS and Omnigator which can be downloaded for free.
OmniPaper Project (13 Dec 2003)
The OmniPaper Prototype has been completed. "It integrates SOAP communication, RDF metadata encoding, automatic keyword extraction through data mining and ontology-based search using Topic Maps."
Tm4JScript Released (12 Dec 2003)
Alexander Johannesen and Thomas Passin have announced that Tm4JScript has been released at SourceForge. "The system runs stand-alone in a browser... The engine is based on reverse-engineering of xtm into an object model. It is a very straightforward design that uses indexes and hash tables to get performance. There are a number of useful methods that more or less make up for not having a query language. The system consists of the core engine, utilities code, and the editor app. A few other apps are also included in the distro."
TM3D Topicmap 3D viewer (11 Nov 2003)
Godefroy Vincent has announced the TM3D product for the visualisation of topic maps. A new URL was later posted: http://silpion.dyndns.org/index.php3.
TMRM Draft (5 Nov 2003)
Patrick Durusau has announced that a new draft of the Reference Model is available.
TMQL Use Cases (5 Dec 2003)
TMQL use cases have been published.
Norwegian Conference (28 Nov 2003)
The presentations from a well attended Topic Map conference in Oslo are now available.
TM4Web/Velocity (27 Nov 2003)
"The TM4J project is pleased to announce the initial release of TM4Web/Velocity. TM4Web/Velocity is a package for the processing of topic maps to HTML pages (or in fact any kind of text files). The package allows both an off-line batch transformation and an on-the-fly transformation as part of a web application. A sample web application and sample templates for offline and online HTML page creation are distributed as part of the package."
TM Harvest First Official Release (15 Nov 2003)
TMHarvest, part of the TM4J project has just been released. "The TMHarvest library is based on TM4J and provides a convenient way to generate automatically topic maps from different data sources. A rules files with embedded templates (written in XML) defines from which data sources topic map constructs should be taken into account as well how new or existant topics should be associated."
NLP and TM (11 Nov 2003)
Dan Corwin has invited people to help beta testing of MODELER. "Lexikos wants to test our design and speed R&D on MODELER 1.0. So we hereby appeal to its future user community for help. We need a few paying, XTM-savvy beta customers now for pre-releases."
CXTM Draft available (7 Nov 2003)
Kal Ahmed has announced the availablility of CXTM Draft (PDF).
Reference Model use case document (5 Nov 2003)
"A use case document for the Reference Model has been submitted as by Patrick Durusau and Steve Newcomb as N447."
New TMDM Draft (23 Oct 2003)
The SAM is now called "ISO 13250-2: Topic Maps - Data Model" (TMDM). Lars Marius Garshol has announced the release of an updated draft (PDF). The first committe draft was published on 11 Nov 2003.
XTM4XMLDB (20 Oct 2003)
Stefan Lischke has developed a TMAPI implementation for an XML database called XTM4XMLDB. "XTM4XMLDB is an implementation of the TMAPI for native XML - Database, which supports the XML:DB API. XTM4XMLDB is a TopicMap engine, which works with a native XMLDB as Backend."
TopicMapCentral: A site for TM Patterns (20 Oct 2003)
"The goal of this site is to provide a place for collaborative development of topic map patterns and ontologies. It includes a Wiki for the discussion both of the proces of pattern creation and for patterns themselves.
TM4J 0.8.3 Released (9 Oct 2003)
TM4J 0.8.3 "adds a number of bug fixes
and new XML Catalog-based locator resolution courtesy of Murray Altheim... [it] also includes the first version of the TM4J Administrator's Tool, a GUI tool to help managed topic maps in persistent stores.
French translation of XML Topic Maps (XTM 1.0). (25 Sep 2003)
Jean-Jacques Thomasson & Alain Herbuel are very pleased
to announce the French translation of XML Topic Maps (XTM 1.0).
AsTMa* (14 Sep 2003)
Quite a lot was happening with AsTMa over July, August and September. The AsTMa* Overview was updated. The first set of query tutorials was published, as was a query demo. Further, two artles on TM engineering were pulished: AsTMa* Topic Map Engineering (Part I) and AsTMa* Topic Map Engineering (Part II). rho can certainly write more quickly than I can report :)
Can an individual be a class? (6 Sep 2003)
This issue was discussed on the topicmapmail list during the instance-of relationship thread. Daniel Rivers-Moore made an interesting post with some further reading.
Thinkgraph (11 Aug 2003)
Michel Kern informed the TM community about Thinkgraph which "is a mix between a MindMapping appplication "(structured display of informations) and a 2D drawing application (free drawing)."
Alice Through the Looking Glass (8 Aug 2003)
Bernard Vatant made a book recommendation whilst discussing names and identity: "For the (hopefully improbable) reader still unaware of Lewis Carroll's
pionneering work in those difficult matters back in 1871, when the oldest
and wisest of us all were barely born, this is a *must* background reading:
"Alice Through the Looking Glass, Chapter VIII : It's My Own Invention" .
The "Annotated Alice" by Martin Gardner should still be available although
it was published in the 60's - Penguin Books - ISBN 0 14 00 1387 3."
veryhappening.com (7 Aug 2003)
A side project of the author of this site, http://www.veryhappening.com/, has just posted a list top 10 "topic map practitioners" (amongst other things) according to the number of hits each practitioner has recorded in Google. Obviously such a method doesn't purport to be qualitative in any way but it does point to who has been most active in the community. There's also an RSS feed. Enjoy.
Extreme Markup Languages 2003 (4-8 August 2003)
Extreme will feature topic map presentations. See the schedule at a glance. You can also scroll through aggregated proceedings to find several topic map presentations.
TMPath - Introduction (21 July 2003)
Dmitry Bogachev has summarized his results of my experiments with XPath-like language for
Topic Maps.
GNOWSYS (15 July 2003)
"GNOWSYS, Gnowledge Networking and Organizing System, is a web application for developing and maintaining semantic web content developed in Python and works as an installed product in Zope... GNOWSYS is a free software released under GNU GPL." GNOWSYS also supports XTM export.
Some humour for a change (7 July 2003)
This is by no means news but I think it deserves a look in at topicmap.com. Two years ago Sean McGrath asked XML_DEV How many XML gurus does it take to change a light bulb?. The answer is still pertinent today.
Topic Maps Reference Model: Requirements (4 July 2003)
Steve Newcomb has announced that a draft of "Topic Maps Reference Model: Requirements is available for review.
Canonical XTM draft (4 July 2003)
Kal Ahmed has announced that "the first draft of the requirements for ISO 13250-4, Canonical XTM is now available for review and comment."
AsTMa? Language Specification 0.3 (24 June 2003)
Robert Barta has announced AsTMa? Language Specification 0.3, "a proposal for a query and TM transformation language."
xSiteable 0.88 (23 June 2003)
A new version has been released at the xSiteable site.
PSI Thread (13 June 2003)
An interesting discussion involving a "PSI respositoty" was started by Alexander Johannesen. Seems like there is some healthy interest for a PSI repository (and software) out there. The thread brings out the tension between grass roots efforts which want to do something now and the desire for stability in PSI sets. In the meantime, there is, of course, the list at easytopicmaps.
TM Harvest (16 May 2003)
Christoph Froehlich has "started to implement a topicmap builder called TMHarvest.
TMHarvest targets the creation of topicmaps from existing data.
It uses a mechnism where templates and datasources works in conjunction
in order to generate TopicMap-Objects."
Recommendations of May 2003 Meeting of WG3 (5 May 2003)
The highlights of the WG3 meeting in London have been published.
XML Europe 2003 (5-8 May 2003)
XML Europe has rolled around again - this year in London. As usual there will be lots of topic map presentations in the Knowledge Technologies stream as well as a couple of tutorials.
TMNav 0.2.5 Released (7 May 2003)
Christoph Fröhlich and Niko Schmuck "are glad to announce the release of TMNav 0.2.5. TMNav is a graphical topic map browser (using Java Swing) written with the help of the TM4J topic map library to allow a user to easily navigate through her own topic maps". The new version features the following:
- improved UI
- basic merge support
- topic maps written in LTM can be read in
- support of all current tm4j providers (like hibernate backend)
- new TreeRender View to ease navigation at "hot spots"
Recommendations of May 2003 Meeting of WG3 (5 May 2003)
Recommendations of May 2003 Meeting of WG3 have been published.
GraphViz in xSiteable Demo (30 Apr 2003)
Demonstration of server side graphing at the xSiteable site.
New mailing list: semantic-cms (12 Apr 2003)
The Semantic Content and Knowledge Management Association has established a mailing list "to cultivate and share knowledge dedicated to one subject: The application of new technologies (particularly XML Web services) and business models to Content and Knowledge Management. In particular, the potential of Topic maps and the semantic encoding of content will be explored in-depth." NB. The forums have since moved to http://www.ondemand-strategy.com/.
Canonical XTM (5 Apr 2003)
Steve Pepper has announced that "The first draft of the Canonical XTM specification has been posted as N395 at http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/cxtm/." Canonical XTM's "purpose is to enable the development of conformance test suites for topic map processors by ensuring that all processing defined therein has been performed correctly."
New SAM Draft (3 Apr 2003)
Lars Marius Garshol has announced that a "near-final text" has been published at isotopicmaps.org.
New "Topic Maps Model" (30 Mar 2003)
Steve Newcomb has announced that "The latest draft of the Reference Model, version 2.30, retitled "Topic Maps Model", to be published by ISO as N0393, is now available at
http://www.isotopicmaps.org/tmmm/TMMM-2.30/N0393.html".
xSiteable 0.8 released (19 Mar 2003)
A new version xSiteable has been released. "The xSiteable project has reached a rather complex release with a number of new and exciting features: Ontology, Taxonomy, Metadata, Blogging and Wireframe"
TMCL-WG and TMQL-WG move (23 Feb 2003)
The TMCL-WG and TMQL-WG list have decided to move from YahooGroups to isotopicmaps.org. Subscribe at http://www.isotopicmaps.org/mailman/listinfo/tmcl-wg or http://isotopicmaps.org/mailman/listinfo/tmql-wg.
Topic Maps Congress in Darmstadt (18 Feb 2003)
"The first German Topic Maps Congress will take place at April 10, 2003 in Darmstadt... Ten presenters (users, vendors, academics) will talk about how Topic Maps work, available tools, how to develop Topic Maps, how to visualize them, and how to integrate them with the Semantic Web approach. Real-world use cases will demonstrate various applications of Topic Maps."
www2003.org (13 Feb 2003)
Holger Rath will be presenting a one day tutorial at The World Wide Web Conference to be held in Budapest, 20-24 May 2003.
Topic Maps Handbook (12 Feb 2003)
empolis has published the "The Topic Maps Handbook". "You will discover first hand which role topic maps play in the field of knowledge management, what a typical application could look like, how topic maps can be generated and of course, find a detailed introduction into this fascinating technology with numerous examples."
NLP Project (11 Feb 2003)
Dan Corwin is seeking support from the XTM, Java and NLP interest groups for MODELER, a toolkit for encoding NLP lexicons under XTM 1.0. "NLP and XTM complement each other nicely, but they need some willing firms and individuals to follow suit. I'd welcome your support."
AsTMa= -> XTM (11 Feb 2003)
Robert Barta has provided an online tool for converting AsTMa files to XTM. Put the tool through its paces by converting an online AsTMa file.
Beer TM (24 Jan 2003)
Demonstration Topic Maps aren't always about Opera. BeerTM "is a collaborative project to create a topic map about beer. The idea is to first create an ontology for describing beer, and then allow people to provide their own content using that ontology. The topic maps provided by different people can then be merged together to yield larger data sets." Geir Ove Grønmo has chipped in with his own impressive contribution.
TMCL-WG Call for participation (21 Jan 2003)
Mary Nishikawa has invited participation in a new Topic Map Constraint Language mailing list. "Graham Moore and I are now preparing to update the requirements document for the Topic Map Constraint Language (TMCL)... Please join http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tmcl-wg/ if you would like to participate or just follow the discussions."
Conclave (15 Jan 2003)
Guy Murphy has announced a demonstration of Conclave - "a Wiki/WebLog application built on the .NET platform using a TopicMap[-like] back-end."
TM4J 0.8.0 Released (15 Jan 2003)
TM4J 0.8.0 adds a new persistent storage model for relational databases. This storage model uses the Hibernate O-R mapping tool and supports a wide range of databases. This back-end has been tested against MySQL, Oracle9i and Oracle 8.
GooseWorks updated (9 Jan 2003)
The GooseWorks site has been revised and includes TmTk 0.7 (topic maps toolkit) for download and a demonstration of mod_topicmaps 0.4.
xSiteable 0.6 released (8 Jan 2003)
A new version xSiteable has been released.
The Hindu (23 Dec 2002)
A topic map article appeared in The Hindu. "Netspeak this time takes a look at the features of the emerging technology, Topic Maps projected as a tool to retrieve information in a more efficient and meaningful way."
xSiteable 0.5 released (13 Dec 2002)
The project xSiteable has just been released in a 0.5 version, packing such features as topic maps, notation for content and the fast Sablotron xslt parser by Ginger Alliance.
Draft SAM available (5 Dec 2002)
Lars Marius Garshol has announced the availability of the new SAM draft.
Draft Reference Model available (14 Nov 2002)
Steve Newcomb has announced the availability of the Draft Reference Model.
TM Weblog (12 Nov 2002)
A topic map blog has been launched. "It contains news relevant to the topic map community contributed by Robert Barta as well as the users of the #topicmaps channel. Lots of interesting news there." In a later post, Robert Barta described the aggregation techniques which can be used to generate the blog.
TM4J gets relational backend (5 Nov 2002)
Experimental code has been checked in which persists topic map data in an RDBMS using JDBC and an O-R mapping tool called Hibernate. Hibernate supports a number of databases including Oracle, DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sybase, SAP DB, HypersonicSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Progress, Mckoi SQL, Pointbase and Interbase.
TMNav Released (21 Oct 2002)
TMNav, a sub-project of TM4J has been released. "The goal of the TMNav project is to provide an intuitive graphical interface for Topic Map navigation and editing. This release of TMNav supports only the navigation of topic maps, editing facilities will be added in later releases." The source files can be downloaded from SourceForge.
UNSPSC TM available (15 Oct 2002)
The Universal Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC) has been converted into XTM form by Kal Ahmed. It is available at his TM Samples page
Oasis Published Subjects (12 Oct 2002)
A temporary homepage currently exists at http://psi.oasis-open.org/ which will be used "for all published subjects published by the OASIS Technical Committees."
TM IRC Logs are available (11 Oct 2002)
Lars Marius Garshol has announced that "the logs from the discussions on the
public #topicmaps IRC channel are now available on the web. Discussions there range from topic map ideas to standardization issues.
New home at the ODP (4 Oct 2002)
The topic map node has moved to a new home in the Open Directory Project.
New version of TMTab (3 Sep 2002)
Version 0.4.2 of TMTab, a Protege-2000 plugin, has just been released.
TM4J 0.7 Released (9 July 2002)
Kal Ahmed has announced the availability of the next release of TM4J."Release 0.7.0 is a major step forward from the previous 0.6.x series,
adding an extensible indexing system; improved event notification; and a tolog query engine." You can download either the binary or the source distribution from the
SourceForge project page.
Guide to the topic map standards (25 Jun 2002)
A guide has been published by ISO SC34. It "describes what is currently being done, the problems that need to be solved, and how those problems came to be."
SAM Homepage (24 Jun 2002)
ISO has now published a homepage for the Standard Application Model for Topic Maps (SAM). SAM is a formal data model which will be used as a basis for Topic Map syntaxes, query languages and schema languages.
TMs in DMOZ (21 Jun 2002)
Bernard Vatant is now an editor of the newly formed topic map node (dmoz.org/Computers/Artificial_Intelligence/Knowledge_Representation/Topic_Maps/) in the Open Directory Project. NB. It subsequently moved to dmoz.org/Reference/Knowledge_Management/Knowledge_Representation/Topic_Maps/.
ISO 13250 (5 Jun 2002)
The 2nd Edition of ISO 13250 has been released.
Link | Text.
XFML (1 Jun 2002)
eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language (XFML) is a markup language which "leans very heavily on some of the concepts of topicmaps". Peter Van Dijck, its author, is "hoping it will be simple yet powerful enough to be adopted within a year by weblog software and CMS's [and that] it will make people familiar with some of the concepts behind topicmaps so that technology becomes more widely understood."
XML Europe 2002 (20 May 2002)
A topic map has been published of the XML Europe 2002 proceedings including the contents of a number of topic map presentations.
TM4J 0.6.2 Released (9 May 2002)
Kal Ahmed has announced the availability of TM4J 0.6. You can
download either the binary or the source distribution from the
SourceForge project page.
TM4J 0.6 Released (11 Jan 2002)
Kal Ahmed has announced the availability of TM4J 0.6.0 alpha 1. You can
download either the binary or the source distribution from the
SourceForgeproject page.
Alpha release of the GooseWorks Toolkit (14 Dec 2001)
The GooseWorks (GW) Toolkit is an implementation of the
'Topicmaps.net's Processing Model for XTM' by Steven R. Newcomb and Michel Biezunski,
referred to as PMTM4.
New IRC Channel (19 Nov 2001)
Lars Marius Garshol has created an IRC channel for topic maps, which you can connect to
by pointing your favourite IRC client at irc.openprojects.net, and
joining the channel #topicmaps.
TopicMaps.Org moves to OASIS (28 Aug 2001)
The XTM mailing list has now been closed as Topicmaps.Org moves to OASIS. This follows the general consensus that the "isness" of topic maps should be defined at ISO and that ISO is, to quote Steve Newcomb, "the appropriate locus for the
process of rigorously establishing the essential nature of topic map information." Application specific work will continue to be done at OASIS. A corollary of this is the closure of the XTM mailing list and the creation of new public and members lists at OASIS.
TopicMaps.Org looks for new home (3 Jun 2001)
Eric Freese has asked the XTM community to discuss the possibility of TopicMaps.Org moving to OASIS. A corollary of the proposed move is that the XTM 1.0 DTD and further topic map standards processes move back to ISO.
Conferences (1 Jun 2001)
There were a number of presentations at XML Europe given at the conference. Extreme Markup is the next major conference on the horizon.
TopicMaps.Org approves XTM 1.0 (17 Feb 2001)
The XML Topic Map (XTM) 1.0 was
today approved by the Authoring Group of TopicMaps.Org. The
specification is available from the TopicMaps.Org website at
http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/. According to the Editors, Graham Moore and Steve Pepper,
"the publication of XTM 1.0 marks the start of a new phase in
the development of the topic map paradigm. We look forward to
the proliferation of web-based topic map applications in the
coming months."
New TM4J release supports XTM 1.0 (14 Feb 2001)
A new release of TM4J, the
open-source topic map engine written in Java, is now available from the Techquila.com website (www.techquila.com/tm4j.html).
XML 2000 (Dec
2000)
To be held in Washington DC. There will be a whole day devoted to Topic Maps, hosted by TopicMaps.org. The major vendors will also be there.
XML Europe (June
2000)
There was much interest shown in Topic Maps at
the conference with both introductory and technical sessions well
attended. A summary of the events can be found at
XML.com.
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