Ontopia: The Topic Map Company

News from topic space


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This news page is no longer updated! Instead, please see the Topic Maps Snippets blog for recent Topic Maps news.

Kunnskapstinget 2005

Oslo, Norway, 13 September 2005: Torgeir Bergmann (OfficeNet) talked about how Topic Maps and flow can be combined at Kunnskapstinget 2005, the Norwegian Computer Society's annual KM conference. The presentations are available here (in Norwegian).

US Open Enrolment Class

February 2005 Ligent presented the course Practical Topic Maps using the OKS in Chicago.Details

Topic Maps Master Class in Prague

Steve Pepper, Chief Strategy Officer at Ontopia, presented a master class in Prague on January 7th 2005. more | víc

Ready to Search Smarter?

30 November 2004: John Gartner in Wired (Search Smarter, Not Harder) says, "Topic maps are smart indices that improve search capabilities by categorizing terms based on their relationships with other things." To see an example of what he means, try out the Omnigator Demo of the Italian Opera Topic Map. From any page within this topic map you can key in a search string. Try "Aida" and you will see the contexts in which Aida occurs on the result page. There are also other topic maps available from our demo page.

Open Enrolment Class in the Netherlands

November 2005 Ontopia organises a joint practical training course with our partner Diderot Track in the Netherlands Details

People Who Changed The World

November 2004 XML guru Len Bullard was at XML 2004 and has posted a tribute to "the people who changed the world" in his blog. Ontopia would like to thank him publicly for his kind words.

US Open Enrolment Class

October 2004 Ligent presented the course Practical Topic Maps using the OKS in Chicago. Details

Topic Maps in a Mobile Shared Knowledge Environment

March 2003 The team of the TU Berlin presented Shark, a technology platform, based on the Ontopia Knowledge Suite, for enabling the distribution of knowledge assets using mobile devices at the CEBIT 2003 conference.

Knowledge Management using Topic Maps

January 2003 Connect your knowledge by using Topic Maps structures. An article published in the german IT-magazine gives a short overview of topic maps and discusses the benefits if using them as an underlying principle of your knowledge management solution. Knowledge-Management mit Topic Maps

Topic Maps in Tokyo

October 2002 Ontopia and Synergy Incubate are holding an open enrolment topic map seminar in Tokyo on October 21 and 22. The seminar will be held in English and Japanese (through an interpreter) by Ontopian Lars Marius Garshol. Read more.

World's First Topic Map Conference Held in Norway

October 2002 The world's first Topic Map Conference took place in Oslo, Norway on October 18th 2002. More than 75 people gathered at Emnekart Norge 2002 to hear presentations from both experts and users about the business case for topic maps (or "emnekart", as they are called in Norwegian). The keynote was given by Steve Pepper, CEO of Ontopia and Editor of XML Topic Maps (XTM), whose theme was how topic maps help combat infoglut and how they are they are becoming the foundation for a national knowledge base in Norway. Other speakers included Ontopians Lars Marius Garshol and Kal Ahmed. In addition, Jon Solberg from the Norwegian Research Council and H. Holger Rath from Empolis presented in-depth case studies of topic maps applications for web portals and multimedia asset management, while Stian Danenbarger of Creuna showed how topic maps can underpin an exciting new approach to content management. The conference was chaired by Professor Jon Bing, the doyen of the Norwegian IT and science fiction communities. It also occasioned a double-page spread about topic maps in the newspaper ComputerWorld Norge. In terms of population size, attendance at Emnekart Norge 2002 is the equivalent of about 4,500 people at a US conference!

Topic Maps in Österreich

September 2002
(1) The Viennese newspaper Wiener Zeitung has adopted topic maps for its web portal: "Die 'Wiener Zeitung' hat als erstes Zeitungsunternehmen der Welt eine Topic-Map-Datenbank entwickelt und stellt das darin gesammelte Wissen in Form einer dynamischen Linksammlung zur Verfügung." more...
(2) Topic Maps recently featured in a radio program, Was wissen wir denn schon? from the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation which included interviews with the inventor of topic maps, Steve Newcomb, and Ontopia's CEO, Steve Pepper. Transcript in German

New Book on Topic Maps

August 2002 The first full-length book on topic maps in English was recently published by Addison-Wesley. XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web, edited by Jack Park, with Sam Hunting as Technical Editor, includes contributions by some of the key figures in the topic map community.

Ontopian publishes XML book

June 2002 Ontopian Lars Marius Garshol has published his book Definitive XML Application Development on Prentice-Hall. The book is about developing applications that use XML in general, and focuses on general issues and techniques, but uses Python as the example language in most of the book. There is a separate set of chapters that deal with how to apply the concepts taught in the book in Java.

Topic map standards guide published

25 June 2002 ISO SC34 has now published a guide to the topic map standards, which explains what is currently happening with the topic map standards, and where the standardization process is going.

New ISO 13250 edition published

04 June 2002 ISO has now published a second edition of ISO 13250, known as ISO 13250:2002. This edition includes the XTM 1.0 DTD and makes some corrections. Some editorial corrections were made based on comments from the Japanese national body, and a mistake in the definition of facet values was also corrected.

There is also now a new home page for the Standard Application Model, which links together all the relevant information about that work item.

New ISO 13250 drafts posted

03 May 2002 The first two drafts of the new topic map standard being developed by ISO have been posted. An early draft of the Standard Application Model has now been posted, as well as a discussion paper outlining the new Reference Model. Both these documents will be discussed at the upcoming SC34 meeting in Barcelona.

More RDF/topic map fraternization

11 Mar 2002 Representatives of the RDF and topic map communities will be getting together for a nocturne during the Knowledge Technologies 2002 conference at the Westin Hotel in Seattle, USA on March 11th 2002. At centre of the discussions will be a proposal by Ontopian Lars Marius Garshol on how to map RDF models to topic maps in order to exploit the synergies between these two knowledge representation paradigms.

ISO presents roadmap for further work

17 Dec 2001 The Orlando meeting of SC34 presented a roadmap for the further work on topic maps which describes the reorganization of the topic map standard into a multi-part standard, and the plan for achieving full interoperability between the XML and SGML/HyTime syntaxes for topic maps. Plans for future conformance testing are also outlined.

XTM 1.0 now ISO standard

05 Oct 2001 The XTM 1.0 DTD has now been accepted as a technical corrigendum to the ISO 13250 standard, which means that XTM 1.0 is now part of the ISO standard. This ensures the long-term stability of the XTM syntax, and begins the process of aligning the XML-based syntax with the SGML/HyTime-based syntax for topic maps.

ISO to make TM schema language

24 May 2001 The Berlin meeting of SC34 proposed to create a schema language for topic maps, to be called TMCL. This schema language will allow topic map users to describe formally the structure of their topic maps, and will also allow validation of topic maps against schemas, as well as improved editor interfaces. Steve Pepper of Ontopia was appointed as the initial editor of the TMCL standard.

TopicMaps.Org approves XTM 1.0

17 Feb 2001 The XML Topic Map (XTM) 1.0 was today approved by the Authoring Group of TopicMaps.Org, with "Yes" votes being cast by the following participating members: Michel Biezunski, Jean Delahousse, Patrick Durusau, Eric Freese, Sam Hunting, Andrius Kulikauskas, Luis Martinez*, Graham Moore, Steven R. Newcomb, Nikita Ogievetsky, Jack Park, Steve Pepper, Daniel Rivers-Moore, and Bryan Thompson. The specification is available from the TopicMaps.Org website at http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/.

According to the Editors, Graham Moore and Steve Pepper, "the publication of XTM 1.0 marks the start of a new phase in the development of the topic map paradigm. We look forward to the proliferation of web-based topic map applications in the coming months."

New TM4J release supports XTM 1.0

14 Feb 2001 A new release of TM4J, the open-source topic map engine written in Java, is now available from the Techquila.com website (www.techquila.com/tm4j.html). The engine has been updated to support import and export of topic maps conforming to the XTM 1.0 DTD and to provide support for merging of topics by name and by subject identity. The package also includes some sample topic map applications, including a topic map visualisation tool and a converter for making a topic map of a collection of MP3 files.

XTM Editorship Changes

24 Jan 2001 TopicMaps.Org has announced the appointment of Steve Pepper and Graham Moore as editorial chairmen for XTM, the XML Topic Map specification. They take over from Steve Newcomb and Michel Biezunski, who have led the XTM work since January 2000.

"Bringing Graham and Steve in as the new editors reflects the stage that XTM is now at: We needed to streamline and prioritise our workload, the better to accelerate the pace of adoption in the web community," said Steve Newcomb, the outgoing co-chair of the XTM editorial team. "Michel and I are happy that they have picked up the baton. We are confident that they will successfully bring XTM through the final stages of delivery to the market place." (Full announcement)

TMQL moves towards requirements specification draft for KT2001

21 Jan 2001 An updated TMQL requirements document working draft is currently in preparation for circulation before the GCA's Knowledge Technologies 2001 conference in Austin this March. The work on TMQL has been continuing apace since the XML 2000 conference, with Ann Wrightson of Ontopia and Hans Holger Rath of Empolis appointed as acting co-editors of the standard within the ISO SC34 commitee. The current draft of the requirements document has been circulated on the TMQL working group mailing list.

Ann Wrightson commented that the work being carried out by this group "will yield not only a TMQL requirements doc, but also a good set of issues for taking topic maps into modern distributed system architectures, and a suggested forward programme of work for WG3".

XTM gets its first tools

27 Nov 2000 The XML Topic Map (XTM) specification, still in preparation by Topicmaps.org yesterday got its first set of tools, as Nikita Ogievetsky of Cogitech posted their XSLT stylesheets for the transformation of the numerous existing XML DTDs for topic maps. The stylesheets are designed to convert topic maps from the syntaxes used by tools from Cogitech, Empolis, Infoloom, Ontopia and Techquila.com into the XTM syntax. More details and the stylesheets themselves can be found at http://www.cogx.com/xslt4tm2xtm.htm.

XTM spec takes a step forward

15 Oct 2000 The XML topic map specification (XTM) is a step closer to its delivery date goal of December 1 after three gruelling and productive days in Swindon, UK. For an overview of what took place, read the minutes at doctypes.org.

RDF/TM fraternization in Montreal

17 Aug 2000 The much-touted showdown between topic map afficionados and RDF devotees at Extreme Markup in Montreal turned into an orgy of fraternization and common understanding. Further discussions are planned and the result could make the semantic web a reality... Read more about The Free-For-All in Montreal.

Topic Maps at XML Europe

16 Jun 2000 Topic maps made a big splash at XML Europe this year, with fourteen presentations and two tutorials. To find out more, read Liora Alschuler's report on XML.com.