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.
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 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.
Motomu Naito and Shu Matsuura at Tokyo Gakugei University have developed a web site for physics students, called Everyday Physics on Web. The site is still under development, but will provide a guide to the history of physics and important concepts in physics. Most of the content is in Japanese, although some is also in English. The site runs on Ontopia.
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.
A new Topic Maps-driven web site is up: NRK/Skole. NRK is the Norwegian national broadcasting company, the Norwegian equivalent of the BBC. NRK/Skole is a collection of media clips (video and sound) from their archives, targeted at Norwegian school pupils.
It’s all in Norwegian, unfortunately, but some of the content is in English. Here’s Winston Churchill’s blood, sweat, and tears speech, for example.
You can access content via subject (a simple taxonomy), person, program, or, perhaps most interesting, via the curriculum. The Norwegian national curriculum has been published as a topic map, and the NRK/Skole site connects its clips with that topic map, thus letting pupils and teachers browse the site via the curriculum. This means they can pick the subject they are currently studying, find all the “learning goals” for that subject, and then find clips that support each goal.
The site was built by Bouvet, with Ontopia and the Polopoly CMS.
anskaffelser.no is a new Topic Maps-driven site, built for the Norwegian IT directorate. It’s a knowledge portal about procurement in the public sector. It runs on ZTM.
CEDECA is short for Centro di Documentale Etnografica della Cultura Appenninica, which is a “Topic Maps based project for a census of the cultural patrimony located in the mountain community of the province of Pavia”, according to this Fuzzzy.com bookmark.
Further study indicates that they have used the Topincs editor to create the topic map. Apparently, Salvatore Vassallo was also involved.
For years and years people have been asking for a PSI repository that would enable users to look up PSIs that they might consider using in their topic maps and ontologies. Now, NetworkedPlanet has finally stepped up to the plate and launched Subj3ct.com, which does just that.
Haakon Halvorsen has written a critique of navigation in Topic Maps-based portals, inspired by the recent writings in Norwegian media about Topic Maps for navigation.
Unfortunately for international readers it’s in Norwegian only. To me it seems quite fair, and more of a critique of the use of Topic Maps in certain portals than a critique of Topic Maps for portals in general.