Standard.difi.no, a new Topic Maps-based portal running on ZTM, was launched today by Difi, the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment. The site is intended to support the work of the Norwegian Government’s Standardization Council, through providing access to information about various standards and tools for discussing these. The site was built by Bouvet.
New Topic Maps portal: standard.difi.no
February 2nd, 2010hypergraphdb
February 1st, 2010HypergraphDB is a hypergraph database based on the Berkeley DB released as open source by Kobrix. Interestingly, HypergraphDB contains a Topic Maps implementation based on HypergraphDB conformant with Java TMAPI 1.0.
XML Prague 2010
January 29th, 2010The program for XML Prague 2010 has been announced, with one Topic Maps presentation by Benjamin Bock. The conference is held 13-14 March at the Mala Strana University Campus in Prague.
TMCL conformance tests
January 29th, 2010The cxtm-tests project has now expanded to add a conformance test suite for TMCL. The test suite is still being written, but contains two initial tests. The README contains a short explanation of how it works.
Object/semantic impedance mismatch
January 29th, 2010Lars Marius Garshol has published a presentation on the Ontopia blog about the challenges of building semantic applications in object-oriented programming languages. The problem he describes is similar to that faced when building applications with relational databases, known as the object/relational impedance mismatch.
Uniform data tags needed by authorities
January 28th, 2010Computing Magazine has published a letter to the editor by Kal Ahmed, about the need for common identifiers in public linked data in order to ensure that the data can indeed be linked.
nexxor releases topicWorks 1.0
January 21st, 2010nexxor GmbH released version 1.0 of topicWorks, their Topic Maps-based information management system. topicWorks contains a core engine, a browser, a search tool, a graphical visualizer, Microsoft Office integration, and domain-specific modules. For more information, see their web site.
New ISO work item proposal: SDShare
January 20th, 2010The ISO committee (SC34) has sent out a proposal for a new ISO work item, called SDShare. SC34 is now doing a 3-month ballot to see if member countries wish to develop this into a full ISO standard.
The proposal defines SDShare as follows:
The proposal specifies an underlying syndication protocol for the exchange of information about semantic descriptions. The protocol conforms to the Atom Syndication Format and the Topic Maps Data Model (TMDM) and works with semantic descriptions represented as in XTM 1.0, XTM 2.0 and RDF/XML. It defines layers of syndication feeds that a conforming application must provide. Finally it defines algorithms for the provisions and processing of the different feeds on servers and clients.
For those who don’t recognize it, this is the SDShare protocol already developed by NetworkedPlanet and others, for transmitting streams of changes to a topic map using an Atom feed.
TMAPI 2.0 RC2
January 16th, 2010The TMAPI project has released release candidate 2 of the TMAPI 2.0 standard API for Java Topic Maps engines. The main change in this release is a change in the semantics of the equals() and hashCode() methods on all Topic Maps objects. A final 2.0 release of TMAPI is expected shortly.
XATA 2010
January 15th, 2010The XATA 2010 conference on XML and related technologies will be held 19 to 20 May 2010 in Vila do Conde, Portugal. A call for papers is out, asking for contributions on Topic Maps among other subjects.