[topicmapmail] Topic Maps, Description Logics and Semantic Networks

[Lars Marius Garshol]

Hi Giuliano,

* Giuliano Vivanet
>
> Before this, I need to find more informations and references about  
> relationships between Topic Maps, Description Logics and Semantic  
> Networks (especially KL-ONE). Do you know if someone has already  
> examined this issue?

A lot of work has been done on Topic Maps and RDF, but none that I  
know of on Topic Maps versus description logic. What do you want to  
know about it?

The short story, IMHO, runs like this: there is no official defined  
mapping to description logic from Topic Maps. The closest you can get  
are some informal inference rules given in clauses 7.2 and 7.3 of the  
standard.

   http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-model/#sect-types

So it's possible to define your own DL interpretation of Topic Maps,  
and it would be nice if someone did, but none exist at the moment.  
The reason for that is that logic is not really much used in Topic  
Maps applications at the moment.

I don't know of any work comparing Topic Maps to KL-ONE, either. The  
answers would probably be similar to those for DL, I imagine.

> I have already read some papers and "XML Topic Maps: Creating and  
> Using Topic Maps for the Web", but I need more informations and  
> references...

The TMRA conference would probably be of interest to you, then, if  
you haven't heard of it already:
   http://www.tmra.de

--Lars M.