Ontopia: The Topic Map Company

The many applications of topic maps

Topic maps bring valuable functionality to a wide range of applications

The OKS has been used to bring value and return on investment to a wide range of applications. Here's a sampling:

Driving the semantic portal Kulturnett

ABM-utvikling is funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture in order to look after the interests of the Archive, Library ("bibliotek"), and Museum communities in Norway. It is using the OKS as the foundation for Kulturnett 3.0, a government portal for cultural information. This portal is seen as being the foundation for an open, distributed National Knowledge Base in Norway and will eventually make heavy use of Published Subjects and Semantic Web Services for knowledge aggregation across multiple sites.

To see this semantic portal in action, please visit wwww.kulturnett.no.

Another example of a semantic portal is the University of Oslo's Apollon Research Magazine

Increasing educational effectiveness with BrainBank Learning

Cerpus AS is a Norwegian company that offers digital services for better learning and knowledge managment. Their BrainBank product is a web-based educational tool that supports Concept-Based Learning. Version 2.0 was developed by Ontopia using the OKS and is currently in use at a number of schools in Norway. Students build their own "brainbank" by defining what they regard as the central concepts and relations within the subject areas they are studying. Teachers can browse their students' brainbanks and form an impression of the student's level of understanding and grasp of each individual subject. The application is of particular interest in that it demonstrates the applicability of Topic Maps in eLearning and proves that it is possible to build user-friendly applications for editing topic maps.

Read more about it in the paper, BrainBank Learning - building personal topic maps as a strategy for learning presented at XML 2004 or visit the BrainBank Learning site.

Improving search precision for maritime intelligence

This US organization is the chief provider of maritime intelligence for a large community of government intelligence services and their clients. Like most things military, the information base is vast, not just in shear size, but in its breadth and historical scope. In the past, skilled analysts combed search results for insights and relationships, which just wound up in more documents. They decided to use topic maps and the OKS to provide timely and precise answers for specific questions.

Read more about this application in the white paper Organizing Mountains of Information into Actionable Data: ONI relies on Topic Maps to improve search capabilities prepared by our partner, Innodata Isogen.

Closed-loop search for Tax Office portal

The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration website is aimed at supporting citizens in fulfilling their tax and customs obligations. In 2002, it was decided to implement an enhanced search service. The OKS was used to centralize management and control of keywords. A closed-loop process was implemented, connecting site visitors entering search terms with the synonyms used by the search engine and the metadata statements added by authors. The fact that the topic map paradigm is well suited to an evolutionary style of development proved to be an important asset. In this respect, the standardized merging facility was crucial.

Read more about this application in the paper Using Topic Maps and XML to implement a closed-loop search service for the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration website presented by the Dutch Tax Office at XML Europe 2004.

IT asset management

The Centre for Information Technology at the University of Oslo is using Topic Maps and the OKS in a number of projects. Project Houston is creating a centralized System Administration Support Centre for the computer network at the university. At the heart of this Support Centre is a knowledge base in the form of a topic map that is partly automatically generated and partly maintained by hand. The OKS is used both to build this topic map and to deliver it in the form of a web portal. In addition, the OKS is being (or will be) used in the Apollon and Vortex projects.

Managing business process model development and publication

Ontopia partner, RivCom (now CSW), was commissioned to further develop a business process model development project with the twin goals of bringing management of the publishing process wholly within the client company, and giving the creators of business process models the ability to develop and edit models online, and in a web-based editing environment that mirrored the final published site. Following technology option evaluation, a decision was made to develop the new application using a J2EE-compliant topic map engine, and the Ontopia OKS was selected for the task. This approach reflected the desire to build on the existing infrastructure and to re-use current code wherever possible. An additional factor was the anticipated lower total cost of ownership and ease of maintenance compared with alternative options, with almost all application code held in JSPs and XSLT.

Read the full text of the paper, Topic Maps for Business Process Model Development: An Application Case Study

Supporting text analysis for research

TAPoR is the Text Analysis Portal for Research, a collaboration of six Canadian universities to build a centralized gateway to sophisticated text analysis tools. TAPoR @ UAlberta is a hub for text-based computing research in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. Associated projects use TAPoR's significant computing resources, including a high performance server and a computer workshop. TAPoR workshop, located in Arts 4-34, houses eight high-end networked computers, a comprehensive selection of software, and relevant equipment. The OKS is provided as a tool to be used for and by researchers.