Semantic Web Company

From November 11 – 13, 2009 this will be one of the big issues at the 5th International Conference on Topic Maps taking place in Leipzig/Germany. When asked about the relationship between TM and SemWeb conference organizer Lutz Maicher says:

With the vision of the web of data Topic Maps and the Semantic Web move closer over time. Anywhere URIs represent subjects, structured statements are gathered around them. In this context I see subj3ct.com as an interesting ventures. This recently launched service provides URIs for 15 million subjects to be used in structured data. Naturally, linked data hubs like dbpedia or geonames.org are part of it. The crowd is invited to contribute to this collection, also the Topic Maps Lab provides several feeds to register new URIs. Subj3ct.com turns out to be an infrastructure technology for Web 3.0 applications, regardless whether they are based on Topic Maps or other Semantic Web technologies.

Through this convergence the uniqueness of each technology sharpens. Reasoning is the strong point of the Semantic Web. But the strength of Topic Maps are semantic portals and the global federation of facts around subjects. Bringing together all and even contradictory information about each subject – and not building reasoning-ready consistent models of the world – is built into the genes of Topic Maps.

Read the full interview here.

The 2nd International Topic Maps Users Conference in Norway is coming up in April – a good occasion to review the potential of Topic Maps to further the Semantic Turn in Information Technology. SWC’s Tassilo Pellegrini interviewed Graham Moore from Networked Planet who, among many other things, was responsible for the development of the K42 Topic Map Engine. Here’s just a brief preview of questions and answers in the interview:

Q: “Creating Context” is probably the crucial motto when it comes to realize the Social Web. How do you perceive of this “Semantic Turn” in IT?
A: Context is King. If you are selling ads, they are worth more ‘in context’, if you are looking for new music you want it to be relevant to you. [...]. [But] this semantic turn isn’t just about contextualizing ads, it seems to be part of a much broader effort for the enterprise to want deal in smarter information, smarter content.

Q: Topic Maps has traditionally been designed for inhouse use for knowledge management. The current trends go towards the web, bringing up the issue of interoperability or data portability. How do Topic Maps deal with this issue?
A: [...] Topic Maps is always striving towards the subject uniqueness objective, one topic per subject. Thus it inherently has a mechanism of merging, whereby two topics, when deemed to be the same, are merged. Merging consists of taking the union of all properties of both topics and creating a new topic. You can’t do this generically with XML. It doesn’t have the notion of merging as part of its nature. [...].

Read more here.