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Posted to dev@forrest.apache.org by Kal Ahmed <ka...@techquila.com> on 2002/03/18 18:33:36 UTC
Topic Maps for Forrest ? (was RE: Proposal: alternative for
book.xml)
Hi,
I am a relative newcomer to this forum - I've only lurked for a couple of
days. So this is just a tentative suggestion, but it seems to me that you
are dealing with some pretty complex issues which might be (partially if
not completely) addressed by the ISO Topic Maps standard [1] and its XML
incarnation XTM [2]. As well as being quite capable of representing content
organisation structures such as books/chapters/sections, topic maps can be
used to represent the relationship between concepts and can be used to
relate those concepts to the data occurrences which provide more
information about them. A good introduction to topic maps is Steve Pepper's
TAO of Topic Maps [3]. One important thing about topic maps is that they
are mergeable - so individual projects can define their own topic maps and
you can take those individual topic maps, merge them together and create a
topic map for the whole xml.apache.org site.
In practical terms, I am the lead developer of a project producing a topic
map processing engine, TM4J [4] which provides a Java API to parse, merge
and access topic map information. I am also separately developing an
integration with Velocity and there has been interest on the TM4J dev
mailing list in doing something similar with Cocoon. TM4J is open-source,
under the Apache license and makes use of a lot of Apache code, so if there
is an opportunity to give something back, I would be happy to do so!
Cheers,
Kal
[1] http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0058.htm
[2] http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/
[3] http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.pdf
[4] http://tm4j.org/
Re: Topic Maps for Forrest ? (was RE: Proposal: alternative for book.xml)
Posted by Nicola Ken Barozzi <ni...@apache.org>.
From: "Kal Ahmed" <ka...@techquila.com>
> At 14:42 23/03/2002 +0100, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
> >Jeff Turner wrote:
> >
> > > I think it's implicit here that to achieve Forrest's goals, there'll
> > > need a lot more semantic content than your average site. IMVHO that
fact
> > > should be made explicit, to the point of making "semantic markup" the
> > > primary focus of Forrest, with the website being simply a frontend.
> >
> >I agree with the direction, but I also agree with the need to keep feet
> >on the ground.
> >
> >Topic Maps are about metadata, that is data about data.
> >
> >My impression is: we have enough hard time getting the 'data', the
> >metadata will come afterwords.
>
> I can appreciate that point - I see from the list activity how hard people
> are working on the content and presentation - both important aspects of
the
> site. However, I would like to just comment that I believe Topic Maps are
a
> little more than meta data in the sense of being data about data. Because
> Topic Maps also define an intutive organisational structure (topics and
> associations), they can be used not just for asserting meta data about
> resources, but also for organising the resources in such a way that they
> can be more accessible to a new visitor to the site.
Data about data is still, well... , data.
So yes, metadata *is* data, but usually can be done afterwards.
> Also, it is possible to create topics or topic map views of other
> (non-document) data and integrate it with the topic map of the document
> data. Quite a powerful tool for integrating other forms of content into
the
> site.
cool
> >So, no TopicMaps or RDF for now, we'll think about that later, if they
> >make sense, that would be my choice.
>
> I respect that position. I am a relative newcomer to the xml.apache.org
> project (though I have been using Apache XML libraries for a long time
> now), and I would love to be able to help out with any Topic Map / RDF
> related work you may consider in the future. So consider this as something
> of a pre-volunteering ;-)
Good, pre-volunteering accepted :-)
Since I personally don't have *any* /concrete/ clue on how to implement this
in Forrest, I would be very happy to read a RT (random thought, as we call
explanations-proposals) from you on this topic.
I'm very interested especially in real-life use cases and possible
implementations.
--
Nicola Ken Barozzi nicolaken@apache.org
- verba volant, scripta manent -
(discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Re: Topic Maps for Forrest ? (was RE: Proposal: alternative
for book.xml)
Posted by Kal Ahmed <ka...@techquila.com>.
At 14:42 23/03/2002 +0100, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
>Jeff Turner wrote:
>
> > I think it's implicit here that to achieve Forrest's goals, there'll
> > need a lot more semantic content than your average site. IMVHO that fact
> > should be made explicit, to the point of making "semantic markup" the
> > primary focus of Forrest, with the website being simply a frontend.
>
>I agree with the direction, but I also agree with the need to keep feet
>on the ground.
>
>Topic Maps are about metadata, that is data about data.
>
>My impression is: we have enough hard time getting the 'data', the
>metadata will come afterwords.
I can appreciate that point - I see from the list activity how hard people
are working on the content and presentation - both important aspects of the
site. However, I would like to just comment that I believe Topic Maps are a
little more than meta data in the sense of being data about data. Because
Topic Maps also define an intutive organisational structure (topics and
associations), they can be used not just for asserting meta data about
resources, but also for organising the resources in such a way that they
can be more accessible to a new visitor to the site.
Also, it is possible to create topics or topic map views of other
(non-document) data and integrate it with the topic map of the document
data. Quite a powerful tool for integrating other forms of content into the
site.
>So, no TopicMaps or RDF for now, we'll think about that later, if they
>make sense, that would be my choice.
I respect that position. I am a relative newcomer to the xml.apache.org
project (though I have been using Apache XML libraries for a long time
now), and I would love to be able to help out with any Topic Map / RDF
related work you may consider in the future. So consider this as something
of a pre-volunteering ;-)
Cheers,
Kal
Re: Topic Maps for Forrest ? (was RE: Proposal: alternative for
book.xml)
Posted by Stefano Mazzocchi <st...@apache.org>.
Jeff Turner wrote:
> I think it's implicit here that to achieve Forrest's goals, there'll
> need a lot more semantic content than your average site. IMVHO that fact
> should be made explicit, to the point of making "semantic markup" the
> primary focus of Forrest, with the website being simply a frontend.
I agree with the direction, but I also agree with the need to keep feet
on the ground.
Topic Maps are about metadata, that is data about data.
My impression is: we have enough hard time getting the 'data', the
metadata will come afterwords.
So, no TopicMaps or RDF for now, we'll think about that later, if they
make sense, that would be my choice.
--
Stefano Mazzocchi One must still have chaos in oneself to be
able to give birth to a dancing star.
<st...@apache.org> Friedrich Nietzsche
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Re: Topic Maps for Forrest ? (was RE: Proposal: alternative for book.xml)
Posted by Jeff Turner <je...@socialchange.net.au>.
On Thu, Mar 21, 2002 at 09:49:05AM +0000, Kal Ahmed wrote:
> Hi Jeff,
>
> There aren't currently as many extant examples of using Topic Maps for
> websites as there are for using more traditional document-oriented forms of
> XML and XSLT. However, I think that this is mostly due to the relative
> newness of the technology (and the difficulty that those responsible for
> the spec have in explaining it in developer's terms).
Yep. I spent an afternoon reading the XTM spec once. The concept was
very appealing (nicer than RDF), but I couldn't see any practical
application, so I forgot about it.
> That said, those that there are show some of the potential of this
> form of information structuring.
>
> [1] is a web-site run on Zope using a topic map structure to store the
> whole backend.
...
Cool.. I see there's even a project for using TMs in Zope:
"ZTM aims to enable distributed development and maintenance of 'topic
map'-driven 'semantic' web sites by handling data model information
items derived from the ISO 13250 and XTM 1.0 as managed content under
Zope CMF."
-- http://sourceforge.net/projects/ztm/
> [3] is the TM4J project's ongoing attempt at creating a topic-map driven
> website. As you will see from the URL, this is very much "under
> construction". This site is generated using Velocity to process a set of
> topic maps to generate a whole heap of static HTML pages (because the
> server we are running on does not have a servlet container). The HTML/CSS
> needs some tweaking (currently works best in IE) and (as always) the
> content needs a lot more work (!) but at least it shows that it is doable
> with open-source software.
Heh.. it looks awful in Mozilla, but the idea that you can automatically
generate a site like that, with links to "is part of", "related info"
etc, is really exciting. A real life Semantic Web. For Cocoon, there
could be FAQ entries that automatically link to relevant sections of
user documentation, or to an automatically-topicmapped mailing list
archive..
> For Forrest, I think that I would start with a topic map for
> xml.apache.org; a topic map for each project; and then supplement the
> project topic maps with additional information extracted from the
> documentation (e.g. by processing index entry tags in the docbook sources
> or using a doclet to generate topicmapped Javadoc - this is something I am
> experimenting with for TM4J). But as I say, I'm a relative newcomer...
> Anyway, hopefully these two sites give you an idea of what kind of things
> are possible. I would be very interested to hear your comments!
I think it's implicit here that to achieve Forrest's goals, there'll
need a lot more semantic content than your average site. IMVHO that fact
should be made explicit, to the point of making "semantic markup" the
primary focus of Forrest, with the website being simply a frontend.
Have you seen http://www.everything2.com? That's the most mindblowing
example of how powerful this idea behind TMs is. Now imagine a hybrid of
everything2.com, and a regular website.. all generated by Cocoon using
sitemaps, flowmaps and topicmaps..
That's what I hope Forrest could produce :)
--Jeff
(off to do some serious reading-up and playing)
> Cheers,
>
> Kal
>
> [1] http://www.itu.no/Prosjekter/1000203716_09/view
> [2] http://luna.itu.no
> [3] http://tm4j.org/tmp/site/tm4j.html
>
> At 09:12 21/03/2002 +1100, Jeff Turner wrote:
>
> >Hi Kal,
> >
> >Topic Maps are undoubtedly cool. But how practical are they? Are there
> >any examples on the web of people making real use of TMs? Is there any
> >supporting infrastructure; ie, if we create an xml.apache.org TM, is
> >there something that can render that as a hyperlinked site?
...
Re: Topic Maps for Forrest ? (was RE: Proposal: alternative
for book.xml)
Posted by Kal Ahmed <ka...@techquila.com>.
Hi Jeff,
There aren't currently as many extant examples of using Topic Maps for
websites as there are for using more traditional document-oriented forms of
XML and XSLT. However, I think that this is mostly due to the relative
newness of the technology (and the difficulty that those responsible for
the spec have in explaining it in developer's terms). That said, those that
there are show some of the potential of this form of information structuring.
[1] is a web-site run on Zope using a topic map structure to store the
whole backend. Virtually every page is dynamically constructed from the
topic map data. Because it is run on Zope, users can actually add new data
to the topic map via the web interface (not accessible to the general
public unfortunately). The developers of this site created [2] using the
same code base in about 1.5 days! Just to explain for non-Norwegian
speakers, the main ITU website describes projects and institutions involved
in promoting the use of IT in education. So the topics are things like
projects, people, organisations and papers/reports. [1] takes you to the
topic for a project called PLUTO - notice that it is linked to topics
representing the people working on the project, related projects and so on.
[3] is the TM4J project's ongoing attempt at creating a topic-map driven
website. As you will see from the URL, this is very much "under
construction". This site is generated using Velocity to process a set of
topic maps to generate a whole heap of static HTML pages (because the
server we are running on does not have a servlet container). The HTML/CSS
needs some tweaking (currently works best in IE) and (as always) the
content needs a lot more work (!) but at least it shows that it is doable
with open-source software.
For Forrest, I think that I would start with a topic map for
xml.apache.org; a topic map for each project; and then supplement the
project topic maps with additional information extracted from the
documentation (e.g. by processing index entry tags in the docbook sources
or using a doclet to generate topicmapped Javadoc - this is something I am
experimenting with for TM4J). But as I say, I'm a relative newcomer...
Anyway, hopefully these two sites give you an idea of what kind of things
are possible. I would be very interested to hear your comments!
Cheers,
Kal
[1] http://www.itu.no/Prosjekter/1000203716_09/view
[2] http://luna.itu.no
[3] http://tm4j.org/tmp/site/tm4j.html
At 09:12 21/03/2002 +1100, Jeff Turner wrote:
>Hi Kal,
>
>Topic Maps are undoubtedly cool. But how practical are they? Are there
>any examples on the web of people making real use of TMs? Is there any
>supporting infrastructure; ie, if we create an xml.apache.org TM, is
>there something that can render that as a hyperlinked site?
>
>I'm happy to do some legwork constructing a TM for Jakarta or
>xml.apache.org, if you could suggest how it can be used.
>
>
>--Jeff
>
>On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 05:33:36PM +0000, Kal Ahmed wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am a relative newcomer to this forum - I've only lurked for a couple of
> > days. So this is just a tentative suggestion, but it seems to me that you
> > are dealing with some pretty complex issues which might be (partially if
> > not completely) addressed by the ISO Topic Maps standard [1] and its XML
> > incarnation XTM [2]. As well as being quite capable of representing
> content
> > organisation structures such as books/chapters/sections, topic maps can be
> > used to represent the relationship between concepts and can be used to
> > relate those concepts to the data occurrences which provide more
> > information about them. A good introduction to topic maps is Steve
> Pepper's
> > TAO of Topic Maps [3]. One important thing about topic maps is that they
> > are mergeable - so individual projects can define their own topic maps and
> > you can take those individual topic maps, merge them together and create a
> > topic map for the whole xml.apache.org site.
> >
> > In practical terms, I am the lead developer of a project producing a topic
> > map processing engine, TM4J [4] which provides a Java API to parse, merge
> > and access topic map information. I am also separately developing an
> > integration with Velocity and there has been interest on the TM4J dev
> > mailing list in doing something similar with Cocoon. TM4J is open-source,
> > under the Apache license and makes use of a lot of Apache code, so if
> there
> > is an opportunity to give something back, I would be happy to do so!
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Kal
> >
> > [1] http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0058.htm
> > [2] http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/
> > [3] http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.pdf
> > [4] http://tm4j.org/
Re: Topic Maps for Forrest ? (was RE: Proposal: alternative for book.xml)
Posted by Jeff Turner <je...@socialchange.net.au>.
Hi Kal,
Topic Maps are undoubtedly cool. But how practical are they? Are there
any examples on the web of people making real use of TMs? Is there any
supporting infrastructure; ie, if we create an xml.apache.org TM, is
there something that can render that as a hyperlinked site?
I'm happy to do some legwork constructing a TM for Jakarta or
xml.apache.org, if you could suggest how it can be used.
--Jeff
On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 05:33:36PM +0000, Kal Ahmed wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am a relative newcomer to this forum - I've only lurked for a couple of
> days. So this is just a tentative suggestion, but it seems to me that you
> are dealing with some pretty complex issues which might be (partially if
> not completely) addressed by the ISO Topic Maps standard [1] and its XML
> incarnation XTM [2]. As well as being quite capable of representing content
> organisation structures such as books/chapters/sections, topic maps can be
> used to represent the relationship between concepts and can be used to
> relate those concepts to the data occurrences which provide more
> information about them. A good introduction to topic maps is Steve Pepper's
> TAO of Topic Maps [3]. One important thing about topic maps is that they
> are mergeable - so individual projects can define their own topic maps and
> you can take those individual topic maps, merge them together and create a
> topic map for the whole xml.apache.org site.
>
> In practical terms, I am the lead developer of a project producing a topic
> map processing engine, TM4J [4] which provides a Java API to parse, merge
> and access topic map information. I am also separately developing an
> integration with Velocity and there has been interest on the TM4J dev
> mailing list in doing something similar with Cocoon. TM4J is open-source,
> under the Apache license and makes use of a lot of Apache code, so if there
> is an opportunity to give something back, I would be happy to do so!
>
> Cheers,
>
> Kal
>
> [1] http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0058.htm
> [2] http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/
> [3] http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.pdf
> [4] http://tm4j.org/