RDF and Topic Maps Interoperability in Practice

日本語 (Nihongo)

Tutorial description

The goal of this half-day tutorial is to teach a practical approach to RDF and Topic Maps interoperability.

RDF is of course a key component of the "Semantic Web" as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web consortium. Topic Maps is an ISO standard that has much in common with RDF and is expected to play a major role in the wider (lower-case) "semantic web".

Because of the similarities and overlap between RDF and Topic Maps — and not least, perhaps, because they emanate from traditionally rival organizations — many people have seen them as being competing "standards". The authors of this tutorial take a different position. They view Topic Maps and RDF as being complementary and have for several years advocated looking for synergies.

During the last year they have developed and implemented an approach to interoperability between RDF data and Topic Maps data that really demonstrates such synergies in practice and has been utilized in Real World applications.

This tutorial will explain and justify the approach that has been taken and teach how to apply it in practice. It is hoped that this will enable the community to move beyond the current tendency to discuss which of the two is "best", to a situation where a fuller understanding of their differences leads to benefits on both sides.

It is further hoped that one outcome of the tutorial might be an initiative to write and publish a W3C Note explaining the relationship between RDF and Topic Maps and how to achieve interoperability between the two.

No particular background knowledge is required, although some familiarity with either RDF or Topic Maps would be an advantage. Potential attendees are technical or semi-technical people with an interest in understanding how RDF and Topic Maps relate in practice. Depending the mix of prior knowledge, more or less emphasis will be placed on the introductions to RDF and Topic Maps respectively.

The tutorial will include approximately 2 hours of hands-on activity requiring participants to bring laptops. J2SE 1.3 or higher and the latest version of the Omnigator should be preinstalled on participants' computers.

Practical exercises will include defining a vocabulary-specific mapping for a set of RDF data in order to regard it as a topic map, and then performing the same step in reverse (ie, from topic maps to RDF) on a different data set.

Detailed outline

1. Brief Introduction to RDF
2. Brief Introduction to Topic Maps
3. Comparison of the abstract models of RDF and Topic Maps
   1. Symbols and things
   2. Assertions
      1. Names
      2. Occurrences
      3. Associations
   3. Identity
   4. Reification
   5. Qualification
   6. Types and subtypes
   7. Merging
4. Approaches to data conversion
   1. Modelling topic maps in RDF
   2. Devising a generic mapping
   3. Devising vocabulary-specific mappings
      1. From RDF to topic maps
      2. From topic maps to RDF
5. Practical applications with exercises
   1. Browsing RDF models in a Topic Maps application
   2. Converting Topic Maps to RDF
6. Aligning the standards families
   1. Constraint languages
      1. Brief Introduction to RDF Schema, OWL and TMCL
      2. Converting RDF Schema and OWL to TMCL
   2. Query languages
      1. Brief Introduction to TMQL and some RDF query languages
      2. Towards a common query language

The content will be largely based on the paper Living with Topic Maps and RDF with the addition of practical exercises based on Real World applications and further material on OWL.

Speaker biographies

Steve Pepper is the founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Ontopia, a company that provides topic map software, consulting, and training services.

Steve represents Norway on JTC1/SC34, the ISO committee responsible for the development of SGML and related standards, and is convenor of WG3 (Information Association), whose responsibilities include the HyTime and Topic Maps standards. He is the editor of the XML Topic Maps specification (XTM) and the author of numerous papers and presentations on topic map-related subjects, including the well-known "TAO of Topic Maps".

A frequent speaker at SGML, XML, and knowledge management events around the world, Steve was for many years the author and maintainer of the "Whirlwind Guide to SGML and XML tools". He also co-authored (with Charles Goldfarb and Chet Ensign) the "SGML Buyer's Guide" (Prentice-Hall, 1998). His papers include:

1. The TAO of Topic Maps: Finding the Way in the Age of Information
2. Curing the Web's Identity Crisis: Subject Indicators for RDF (co-authored with Sylvia Schwab)
3. The XML Papers: Lessons on Applying Topic Maps (co-authored with Lars Marius Garshol)
4. Ten Theses on Topic Maps and RDF
5. Towards a General Theory of Scope (co-authored with Geir Ove Grønmo)

He is an experienced tutorial instructor and has given numerous tutorials at XML conferences organized by the Graphics Communications Association (GCA) and IDEAlliance.

Lars Marius Garshol is currently Development Manager at Ontopia, a Topic Maps software vendor. He has been active in the XML and Topic Maps communities as a speaker, consultant and open source developer for a number of years. Lars Marius has also been responsible for adding Unicode support to the Opera web browser. He is the author of Definitive XML Application Development, published by Prentice-Hall in its Charles Goldfarb series in 2002.

Lars Marius is co-editor of the Topic Maps Query Language standard (ISO 18048) and the Topic Maps Data Model (ISO 13250-2). He has been responsible for implementing RDF support in two Topic Maps products, the Ontopia Knowledge Suite (OKS) and the Ontopia MapMaker toolkit. His most recent papers include:

1. Topic Maps, RDF, DAML, OIL: A comparison
2. Living with Topic Maps and RDF
3. The XML Papers: Lessons on Applying Topic Maps (co-authored with Steve Pepper)
4. Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! — Making sense of it all

He is an experienced tutorial instructor and has given numerous tutorials at XML conferences organized by the Graphics Communications Association (GCA) and IDEAlliance.