[topicmapmail] Are Topic Maps dead?

[Stefan Lischke]

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Hi,

I want to provoke a little bit by asking the "Community" if the Topic Map technology is dead!
Please don't flame me, i just want to shake up in a positive way.

so here are my main points why i think tm is dead:

1. The traffic on this list is near zero. All i read is some CFP or some announcement of something.
I'm subsribed to many very small OpenSource project ML's where the is a lot of more traffic. There
aren't any new names posting on the list asking simple questions.

2. The work on TMQL and TMCL, the both mostly wanted techs, is very very slow and only
done/influenced by a handful well known people. When i came to this tech back in 2001/02 at the
university there was the same need for TMQL and TMCL like now. nothing really changed for the Users
of this tech.

3. The handful of people (i admire them, please don't misunderstand me) are doing everything in this
tech. So there isn't much diversity. The half-handful of those people also do work for the 2
companies that make money with this tech, not much diversity too.

4. There is still no killer-application based on topic-maps. All i see are some CMS impls with
topicmap. The main advantage of topic maps to describe the world in distributed manner is not used.
Only a topic map enduser application that is installed on thousand pc's and communicating with each
other (merging, searching..) would benefit from the tech.


You regognized the traffic on the tmapi and sc34wg3 ML's in the last days/weeks ?

There is only one enthusiast (Lars Heuer) who is producing input to the overall progress, yelling
for comments or just one response.....

Come on (lets) help him and save topic maps. If not, lets vote for deprecating topic maps.

Stefan

P.S.
Sorry
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