Emnekart 2011

The Norwegian Topic Maps conference, Emnekart 2011, is on february 10.

This year it is a part of Software 2011, which is the main conference for The Norwegian Computer Society.

Here's a few highlights from the english part of the program:

Best Practices for Publishing Linked Open Data
Graham Moore, Networked Planet

Many organizations and government initiatives are advocating and providing support for the publishing of 'Data on the Web'. This is a paradigm shift from publishing HTML pages for people to read, to publishing raw data that can be processed and interpreted by machines and people.

While it may seem a trivial activity to put data on the web, the fact is that many organizations struggle to do this in a way which is useful for their community.

The talk discuss and demonstrates the different levels in quality of publishing linked data on the web, ranging from simple files to complete Linked Data endpoints.

Topic Maps applications for Android and Iphone

Jan Schreiber, Ravn Webveveriet

Jan has written tmjs, - a Topic Maps engine in JavaScript. He will talk about how Javascript and HTML5 makes development of semantic applications independent of platform possible. He has some pretty exciting applications to show too. 

He will show how to visualize geotagged Topic Maps with maps and in an augmented reality browser.

Augmented reality means that you look through your mobile camera and get an annotated view of the world around you on the screen.

Have you even considered how to present a topic map on a limited mobile screen? 

- Jan has.

Semantic Repowering the Afghanistan War Diary

Benjamin Bock and Thomas Efer, Topic Maps Lab - University of Leipzig

In summer 2010 WikiLeaks released one of the largest classified military leaks in history: The Afghanistan war diary. In the news it was labeled a report, but for engineers it was merely a big and messy CSV file with largely unnormalized data. Publishers like Spiegel Online spent several months before the release, manually analyzing the data. With semantic tools this could have been much easier…

Visualizing Topic Maps with Silverlight PivotViewer

I also look forward to the lightning talk where Graham Moore gives a demo of how to visualize Topic Maps with the Silverlight PivotViewer.

Semantic ambiguity and how human communication fails - except by accident

It's been a busy week at the Topicmapmail-list, where a +50 message thread developed, starting off as an announcement of the Afghanistan War Diary as a topic map in Maiana (made from WikiLeaks data).

The discussion went off in several directions, and spun into a discussion of typing and the inherent messiness of trying to model the world.

- We're kind of back at the start. In a messy semi-structured world with information overflow, - what kind of technology can help us find a way?

Steve Pepper:

The categories of human knowledge are better expressed using a prototype model than a criterial-attribute (or "Aristotelian") model. In such a model, roles and types are not sharply differentiated, but rather exist on a continuum.

Alexander Johannesen questioned the basis of linked data and subject identification:

So the question becomes; can we still rely on our TM way of subject identification? I'm not so sure. Things change. And here's the catch; the more you describe that thing, the more you try to pin it down its definition, the less likely it is for that thing to fit whatever thing you need in what you're modelling. And the less likely it is that that model truly represents reality, so there's a whole scale of inherit dis-ambiguity that you need to have in mind when you knowingly have to make a million compromises while modelling.

To what degree do we need things to be correct vs. useful? And, in the end, is it useful that things aren't correct?

Andrew S. Townley had thoughts on scalability and how this can work outside a controlled environment:

Again, once you start trying to correlate statements about things made by millions of people each with thousands of overlapping but inconsistent assumptions, this stuff matters.  In a controlled environment or walled garden, you have a lot more leeway with "useful", but I don't think that's good enough in today's world with over 1 billion addressable pages added to the Web every day.

I think it's important to (continue to) talk about these issues now while there's still a chance of influencing how people try to deal with a world with that much data.  The less retrofitting and rectifying that needs to be done, the easier it will make things for everyone.  Most of the people churning out all that content have no idea these problems exist.  After all, they have Google and the magic search box.  All they need is just a little bit more link juice and social proof... ;)

Patrick Durusau followed up with a blogpost about Semantic ambiguity:

Since we are trying to communicate with other people, there isn’t any escape from semantic ambiguity. Ever.

It all led me back to Wiio's laws, which I have revisited many times before. - So here's some friday edutainment for those of you which haven't read Wiio's laws on

How all human communication fails, except by accident:

1. Communication usually fails, except by accident.
2. If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage
3. There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message
4. The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds

I see the laws as both as a serious warning about how messy human communication is, and as black humor for people trying to do this for a living.

Most of Wiio's work, and the information about his work is ironically in Finnish, which I think most people on this planet doesn't understand very well...

Jukka Korpela has however written an excellent commentary of Wiio's laws

Professor Osmo A. Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. He studied, among other things, readability of texts, organizations and communication within them, and the general theory of communication. 

In addition to his academic career, he has authored books, articles, and radio and TV programs on technology, the future, society, and politics. He formulated "Wiio's laws" when he was a member of the Finnish parliament.

Wikipedia as a good PSI-source?

I stumbled upon an interesting discussion in the blogpost Wikipedia - A Democratic Gold Standard for Topic Maps, where Vegard Sandvold suggests that the Topic Maps community "should adopt Wikipedia as it’s democratic and user-generated repository of topic PSI’s". (Lars Marius Garshol wrote a good blogpost about the general idea behind PSIs)

Steve Pepper disagrees, and argues that ideally the PSD (Published Subject Descriptor) should incude the minimum of information needed to unambiguously identify the subject.

Robert Engels then enters the discussion and argues from the RDF point of view.

My view is that I would currently use Wikipedia, because on some subjects it's the best source I got. I agree with Steve Pepper, but imagine that it could be useful in some contexts to be a bit fuzzy on purpose. A widely defined and a bit fuzzy subject might be exactly want we want, to be able to "start a conversation".

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

Published Subjects and global identifiers

Dataforeningen arrangerer et møte om Published Subjects og globale identifikatorer i universitetsbiblioteket tirsdag 27. mai kl 16-18.

English translation:

The Norwegian Computer Society is planning a meeting about Published Subjects and global identifiers from 16 to 18 on May 27th. The program is quite exciting with four lightning talks, but the presentations are planned to be in norwegian. (We would probably be able to reconsider this and talk english if somebody not understanding norwegian would like to join us).

The meeting will be held in the electronic classroom at the University Library in Oslo.

Steve Pepper (Ontopedia) starts with a quick introduction of the need for shared global identifiers and an introduction to Published Subjects, where he also explains the terminology (PSI, PSD, ...)

Are Gulbrandsen (USIT) presents known published PSI sets and a few unresolved publication and discovery issues. He also discusses potentional sources of PSIs (for instance GREP, ISBN, Wikipedia, LinkedIn and excisting thesauruses).

Alexander Johannesen (Bekk) continues were he left off at Topic Maps 2008, Visions for a Topic Mapped Library, and wants to discuss the use of PSIs from a library perspective. (He has also promised to give us a quick overview over what they have manged to do at The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC), Victoria University of Wellington. (NZETC got the Topic Maps Project of the Year 2008 award).

Stian Danenbarger (Bouvet) also continues from his Topic Maps 2008 presentation: Published Subjects: Small Pieces, Meaningfully Joined, and wants to focus on how we can add context to the discovery of PSI sets. - Who is using a PSI set, and how is it used?

More info in Norwegian

Travelling to Bergen - a metapragmatic digression with semantic underpinnings

In this blog everything is a subject, - remember? And as a Topic Mapper I sometimes get some weird associations that need more than one sentence explaining. Everything is about context, and semantics often needs some context to be understood (ref pragmatics).

When writing another blogpost I desperately wanted to digress a little and tell some stories related to the city of Bergen.

If you ever go to Bergen I can recommend listening to Michael Jackson.

Be sure to sample the fantastic variety of local beer. You can safely leave out the most popular beer, which tastes almost, but not quite, entirely unlike good beer. (You have probably tasted something very similar in most other cities you have visited, - that is if you like beer. I mean if you really like beer it's another story, but you would probably start to see where I am going with this.)

When we're talking about local beer, Brussels is definitely worth a trip, especially if you find yourself in Bergen. The Cantillon brewery beer museum there is one of the few places in the universe where they still believe in spontaneous fermentation. This is also a good reason that it's improbable that the museum will ever relocate or that the top floor will be redecorated. The mash is exposed to the wild yeasts and bacteria that are said to be native to the Senne valley, in which Brussels lies. This is the historic way of making beers, and all the beer in the world before 1800 was really lambic. (Be aware that Brussels and Belgium have more beer museums. Some people joke that Belgium has more beer types than people).

It is however not trivial to find your way there, and that's one of the reasons for this blogpost. Now when I think about it, The way I have started It's probably better to describe the journey the other way, - from Brussels to Bergen.

The best way to travel from Brussels to Bergen is by car (you will miss all the fun by going on the train). From the centre you start following E19 southwest. Then after a while you will see highway signs for 'Bergen'. Then after a while there are suddenly no more signs for 'Bergen'. - You have entered the french-speaking part of Belgium, the province of Hainaut, of which Mons is the capital. The city got it's name because it was located on a hill, and in Belgium any hill is large, so they decided to call it a mountain (context again I suppose). Mons is latin for Mountain.

Mons is the location of the museum where Paul Otlets Mundaneum is kept. After listening to Alex Wrights keynote at Topic Maps 2008 I have an excuse for going back to Mons, - apart from the beer of course. Which reiminds me of what Michael Jackson has to say on the subject. Bergen is also a very nice city however, so there's several good reasons for going there.

Calling the hills of Mons for mountains is however to strech it too far, - it's actually an insult to Bergen. (I won't even mention the fjords which makes quite a difference).

The fun part of this is looking up some webpages for the city of Bergen where you get all kinds of offers for traveling to and staying in hotels in Bergen.