[topicmapmail] TopicMaps in Topics

[Murray Altheim]

Stefan Lischke wrote:
> Hi TopicMappers,
> 
> I just had an idea, maybe its not worth to think about it, but whats 
> your opinion to that?
> 
> Imagine a TopicMap which is representing for example  a whole Company  
> with  employees, customers, projects, products and so on. Now there is 
> an association with the topic "Buys" as type which associates a customer 
> and a product. Nothing new.......
> 
> But now i want to "zoom" into that topic "Buys" which is the reification 
> of the concept "someone buys something".
> And in that zoom-mode i want to see another TopicMap which "describes" 
> the Concept "Buys" in more detail. For example that, if u buy something, 
> u have to pay money and after that u have something more.
> 
> Now i can zoom into the concept "money" and so on.
> 
> This could be useful for example in TopicMap matching or TopicMap merging.
> 
> If u have problems with the "zoom" just imagine two peoples who are 
> talking about a topic and they do not know if they are talking about the 
> same, so person A asks person B "what do u mean exactly, can u describe 
> "Buys" in more detail for me, so i can see if i have a topic which 
> "means" the same but maybe has not the same basename or SI than yours"
>  
> Is there any known technique of different abstraction layers for TopicMaps?
> Or any protocol for doing knowledge exchange in the way i described in 
> words?

You're essentially describing a structure similar to a knowledge
base, built upon an ontology. This is the kind of thing that most
knowledge representation systems are designed to handle and is
not a feature specific to Topic Maps. I happen to be implementing a
system similar to this using Topic Maps, but it could be done in
Protege, Cyc, OCML, OWL, any frame-based system, etc. Each concept
and relation is defined as a specialization of successively more
general concepts and predicates in a rooted tree. In Cyc, this
root is called "#$Thing". Everything inherits from #$Thing.

If you're interested in learning more about this, you might check
out Chapter 7 of XML Topic Maps (ed. by Jack Park), specifically
the article by Leo Obrst and Howard Liu entitled "Knowledge
Representation, Ontological Engineering, and Topic Maps." (Addison-
Wesley 2003). There's also "Knowledge Representation" by John Sowa,
for a more broad description of the entire field. There's also the
online Cyc documentation (which includes tutorials) at

    OpenCyc Documentation
    http://www.opencyc.org/doc/

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

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