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

[Alexander Johannesen]

On 6/13/06, Simon Grant <asimong at btinternet.com> wrote:
> what sense of identity does this list have? What it is, who it is
> for, what kind of people belong to it, what are the topics which are
> discussed here, as opposed to those which are not?

Depends on the phase of the moon, the loon of the week, the week of
the year, the year of happenings ... the whole shebang. There's a
diverese group of people here, from TM wannabies to KM professionals;
some with TM bias, others with none. Anything. Everyone. You won't
find a correct answer. Some days it's busy, but most of the time it's
quiet; we're all too busy I reckon.

> I am still sorry that I wrote as I did earlier, which was interpreted
> as a (not necessarily complementary) view of the list members - of

Well, as far as I know, I was the only one who read it that way, so if
anything, blame me.

> course it was not intended that way at all. But it might be helpful
> to consider what may have contributed to my mistake. I'll tell you
> straight what would have avoided it altogether: a public topic map of
> the subjects of interest to people here.

I think it's symptomatic for this list that the only joint effort in
recent years in terms of creating a Topic Map is one that involves
beer. :)

> [..] I intended to ask
> 1. whether people shared the view that TMs are in some way closer to
> human mental representation

It's what drove me to TM in the first place, this fuzzy "it looks like
a very human way of representing knowledge", but these days I keep
telling people that it is easy to see that, but much harder to do
that. :)

I think you struggle with the paradigm shift you get from coming from
data modelling to ontological modelling or knowledge representation
systems. In reality, they're not *that* different, but the subtle
differences - especially where you can talk about the language in
which you model - can be *very* persuasive to us; I can call this
relationship by name! This means I can look for "all topics of type
'fish', has a name like 'lung', occurres in 'south-america', and
lives-in 'delta's " That's a powerful way to express "more humanly"
something like (a poor ad hoc example) "SELECT * FROM animals, names,
regions WHERE animals.type = 'fish' AND regions.id = 'south-america'
AND animals.region-id = 'south-america' AND names.aid = animals.id AND
animals.habitat = 'delta' SORT-BY names.name GROUP-BY regions.id"
*phew* And that's only if the data modeller had any reasonable
training in normalisation; it could be far worse.

Topic Maps does lend itself to a more natural way of modelling things
by simply being ontological based, but in all seriousness, modelling
simple maps is easy. Once they grow, and especially once you want to
actually *do* something with them, that's where it gets hairy. Don't
let this early simplicity let you think it will *all* be easy. :)

> Put like this, is there anything wrong or strange or inappropriate
> with my questions?

No.

As to Topic Maps that don't feel like a topic map, try
http://nationaltreasures.nla.gov.au/ where all items, images, notes,
pages, themes and so on are topics, with assocations linking them.
There are other examples out there as well, and this just to show that
Topic Maps in itself doesn't provide anything extraordinarie out of
the box; it's a technology like many other, although one that *I* use
because I can do things faster and more efficent in them.


Regards,

Alex
-- 
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
                                                         - Frank Herbert
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