[topicmapmail] Not just Temporality in Topic Maps, but a whole approach

[Are Gulbrandsen]

Simon Grant:
> Useful comments, thanks! ...
>
> Kal Ahmed:
>> My approach of late has been to shield users from topic maps almost
>> completely. There is really no reason at all why an application  
>> user needs
>> to know about the underlying model for representation.
>
> That is what interests me about Topic Maps. Immediately I read the  
> comparison of TM and RDF I got the impression that TM  
> representations could easily be closer to the way the user thinks  
> of the domain than (say) RDF. Now, I don't have a metric for  
> "closer" here, just an intuition, which no doubt many others share.


Steve Pepper held an excellent presentation closing the Norwegian  
Topic maps conference 2006, where he partly talked about this, as  
part of his SWOT analysis of Topic Maps (Strengths – Weaknesses –  
Opportunities – Threats),
http://forum.dataforeningen.no/attachment.php?attachmentid=608

A few points he made, ref. slide 20-26:

- RDF/OWL is for machines;
   Topic Maps is for humans.

- RDF/OWL is optimized for inferencing;
   Topic Maps is optimized for findability.

- RDF/OWL is based on formal logic;
   Topic Maps is not based on formal logic.

- RDF/OWL is to mathematics as Topic Maps is to language.

(Some people on this list might not agree with all of the above, but  
as this is presented out of context, please have a look at the slides  
before disagreeing)


Best Regards,
Are D. Gulbrandsen
The XML-group,
Center for Information Technology Services
University of Oslo


PS. The slides can not do Steves presentation justice, so I hope we  
will have a chance to film the presentations at the next years  
conference.

People attending Emnekart 2006 were generally very pleased with the  
conference, and rated only one thing higher than Steves presentation,  
- the food.  :-)
(This is actually not entirely correct, as it was the content of his  
presentation that got rated a little bit lower than the food, the  
actual presentation got the highest rating at the conference).

Lars Marius Garshol blogged the conference in english, so we do have  
a picture of him speaking:
http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/29.html