Vestlandsforskning, or the Western Norway Research Institute, is 25 years this year, and celebrated its anniversary with a new web site, based on Topic Maps and ZTM. The content is nearly all in Norwegian.
Svein Ølnes’s blog has a little more detail, in Norwegian.
Difi, the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment, has published a common classification intended to be used in the Norwegian public sector, called Los. It’s specifically aimed at municipal administrations, but could also be used more widely.
Los is published in XTM format, with PSIs for all the main concepts. The main part of it is a hierarchical classification (a taxonomy, basically), but it also has topics (and PSIs) for major governmental units, provinces, counties, and a few other things.
So for anyone developing Topic Maps-based services for the public sector in Norway this is something that should be studied carefully. Given the careful use of PSIs it’s also a major contribution to Open Linked Data in Norway.
Edit: We’ve been asked by non-Norwegian readers where the XTM download is. There’s actually several, and they’re all on the documentation page. The first one, los-alt.xtm, contains everything. The others are subsets.
The Norwegian Topic Maps User Group is arranging a meeting about the Norwegian National Broadcasting application on March 2 at Bouvet’s offices in Oslo. The presentation will present
For more information, please see the official page.
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.
The Fourth International Topic Maps Users Conference takes place on April 14-15 2010, at Felix Conference Centre, Oslo, Norway. The first day will be tutorials, the second the conference itself. The actual call for papers can be found on the conference site.
(Personally, I’m happy to see the conference is now in April rather than March, which means the weather is likely to be a lot more pleasant for international visitors.)
Topic Maps 2010, the Fourth International Topic Maps Conference, is being held in Oslo on April 14-15 2010, with one day of tutorials before the conference. The call for contributions is out, so if you want to present something or sponsor the conference, now is the time to start getting ready.
The University of Oslo is working to choose a new web publishing system for the university, and in the process a working group has put together a report on trends in web publishing, titled Rapport fra ”Trendanalyse” i delprosjektet Valg av publiseringsløsning Fase 1 (PDF in Norwegian). It’s quite concise and to the point, covering a wide range of sites and technologies, from Flickr to OpenID, and Topic Maps also get a brief mention under the chapter about Web 3.0.
The Norwegian ISO committee mirroring the international SC34, officially known as SNK/185, is planning to start holding regular meetings to discuss Norwegian positions on the ISO standards that SC34 develops (primarily Topic Maps, OOXML, ODF, and DSDL). This would enable Norwegian members to stay informed about ongoing work and to provide input to it (and even vote on it) without having to travel to international meetings. They would, however, be required to join Standard Norge.
If anyone is interested, please contact either Bjørnhild Sæterøy at Standard Norge, or Lars Marius Garshol.
The Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (Difi) just launched prosjektveiviseren.no, a Topic Maps-based portal running on ZTM. The portal is meant for public sector employees working in IT projects, and is intended to help them exchange experiences and track and follow best practices. There is also a whole set of information on running IT projects, reusing common IT components, etc.
Norwegian consultancy Making Waves have published a blog posting on “The pros and cons of Topic Maps”. Sadly, it’s Norwegian only.