[topicmapmail] Application for TM

[Murray Woodman]

* Carlo Moneti <cmoneti@twcny.rr.com>
|
| Hi,
|
| A topic map wiki is one application previously discussed as a TM
| demonstration application. That lead me to think about
| http://Wikipedia.org. What a public relation coup it would be to turn
| wikipedia.org into a TM driven site. Wikipedia has done an amazing
| job. Can TM improve the current system? The software (and data) is
| freely available: http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/ . It might be
| interesting to see how easy/difficult it is to harvest the existing
| database data into a topic map.

I have been thinking along these lines as well. The Wikipedia software
currently supports a "categories" feature which is currently not being
used. It is intended to be a catch all for whole/part and type/instance
relationships. I popped by their technical mailing list a few months ago
and suggested that there would be some advantages if there were a
mechanism to capture (i) the differences between the above relationship
types and (ii) the ability to type other relationships.

It was generally thought that asking users to distinguish between hasA
and isA was too much of an ask. So, it seems that the main method of
encoding will continue to be through untyped hyperlinks.

There is however, a proposal to extend the category system which would
be very helpful:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-value_pairs
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorization_with_field-value_pairs

Having said that there are currently "list" pages which would be good
starting points for starting to build a topic map. I don't know how much
further you could get using automated means though.


cheers

Murray Woodman

http://www.topicmap.com/