Exploring Semantic Mashups in the Wandora Workshop at Topic Maps Norway 2009

I really look forward to the Wandora workshop at Topic Maps Norway 2009 / Emnekart 2009 on March 18, as I have wanted for some time to play a bit with Wandora.

Wandora is an Open Source Java application made mainly for building and managing topic maps, but I think of it as a more general semantic toolbox, and think that exploring Wandora as a semantic extraction tool will be fun.

Wandora has a graphical user interface and several data storage options. Wandora both reads and exports the Topic Maps formats LTM and XTM along with the N3 RDF-format, which should make it a very useful toolbox.

The workshop will explore Wandora as a tool for extracting information from open web sources using some of the many built-in extractors to generate topic maps. It will demonstrate how to use Wandora to do semantic mashups. This is a hands-on workshop, which I imagine should be interesting both to TM developers, Semantic Web developers and developers who knows web 2.0 style mash-ups.

I have a dream of one day converting my well-tagged mp3-collection to a topic map, mash it up with open music information, and explore the new exciting possibilities for navigation and search, which would make iTunes look rather dull.

The workshop will focus on a few of the many interesting Wandora extractors to generate and merge topic maps. The list of available Wandora extractors is impressive, and keep on growing with every new release:

• MP3 ID3 metadata
• JPEG metadata
• PDF metadata
• FreeDB (music CD metadata)
• Last.fm XML feeds
• Internet Movie Database datafiles
• Converts and imports any SQL database to a topic map
• BibTeX
• Flickr
• YouTube
• Digg and Del.icio.us
• Geonames
• Wikipedia extractor and a more general MediaWiki extractor
• Wordnet
• OpenCalais classifier
• OpenCyc extractor
• RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds
• Convert emails and email repositories to a topic map
• Convert file system structures to a topic map
• Microformat extractors:
  • Convert geo microformat snippets to topic maps
  • Convert hcalendar microformat snippets to topic maps
  • Convert hcard microformat snippets to topic maps