Saskia, a library cataloger now based in Vienna, has started a blog called all things cataloged. In her own words it is:
I like to think of this blog as a scrapbook or notepad for ideas, musings and findings revolving around cataloging, Topic Maps, technology or libraries in general.
Topic Maps company Nexxor offers a Topic Maps startup package for a fixed price, including (if my understanding of the German is correct) consulting, development, installation, and license fees.
For more information, please see the Nexxor site.
Lars Johnsen, of the University of Southern Denmark, has written a paper titled Topic Maps: From Information to Discourse Architecture, published in Journal of Information Architecture. Journal of IA describes itself as “an international peer-reviewed scholarly journal”.
The abstract says:
Topic Maps is a standards-based technology and model for organizing and integrating digital information in a range of applications and domains. Drawing on notions adapted from current discourse theory, this article focuses on the communicative, or explanatory, potential of topic maps. It is demonstrated that topic maps may be structured in ways that are “text-like” in character and, therefore, conducive to more expository or discursive forms of machine-readable information architecture. More specifically, it is exemplified how a certain measure of “texture”, i.e. textual cohesion and coherence, may be built into topic maps. Further, it is argued that the capability to represent and organize discourse structure may prove useful, if not essential, in systems and services associated with the emerging Socio-Semantic Web. As an example, it is illustrated how topic maps may be put to use within an area such as distributed semantic micro-blogging.
Lars Heuer has set up Mappify, an online RDF to Topic Maps conversion service, based on the MIO Topic Maps input/output library, using Ontopia’s RTM mapping vocabulary. The service can read a number of RDF formats and output a number of Topic Maps formats.
The deadline for papers to TMRA 2010 is June 30th, which is approaching rapidly. So remember to get your proposals in!
On June 8th Helmholtz Zentrum München announced that they were investing in a Topic Maps startup founded by Volker Stümpflen. The startup is to work on knowledge technologies (ie: Topic Maps) in the life sciences, and the name appears to be InfoDabble.
The Helmholtz Zentrum München is the German research center for environmental health, focusing on chronic diseases resulting from a combination of genetic disposition and environmental factors.
The TMLab is working on a new open source Topic Maps engine in Java called MaJorToM. It implements TMAPI 2.0 and so far has only an in-memory backend. However, this is more than just another Topic Maps engine, since it provides some additional features over and above the usual:
The engine is not released yet, but the source code is available in the Google Code repository.
The book The Semantic Web for Knowledge and Data Management: Technologies and Practices, by Zongmin Ma and Huaiqing Wang, was published by Information Science Reference in the US in 2008. I didn’t notice it before now because of the title.
However, according to the topic cloud at Google Books the book has quite extensive coverage of Topic Maps. I don’t have the book, and can’t see the contents, so I haven’t been able to check this, but found it interesting, anyway.
Robert Cerny has released version 4.3.0 of Topincs. The main new features are:
For more details, see the Topincs wiki.
Stian Danenbarger did a highly acclaimed presentation on Linked Data at the GoOpen conference. A video of the presentation, in Norwegian, can be seen here.