On 30 Nov 2004, at 22:02, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

> Yes.  It is, after all, a map.  I tend to think of
> inverted indices, but after seeing the Ontopia demo,
> particularly the query demo, it can be more.
>
> So it might also be a useful way to map say, discoverable
> assets/interfaces/innovations.  In other words, we might
> use it to document and navigate discoverable services.
> Would a UDDI registry be a good candidate for topic mapping?
>

A lot of things that UDDI has tried to achieve could be done with a 
topic map. The question is if that is the right thing to do. From the 
point of view of a registry of services and a query interface for 
retrieving information about those services, UDDI is already in that 
space. How well embedded UDDI is I don't really have a good feel for - 
and so I would (personally) feel cautious about making proposals to 
throw it all out and start again with topic maps!

However, in terms of documenting and managing the deployment of web 
services, UDDI really only addresses half of the problem. A topic map 
view of a UDDI registry leaves the way open for extension with other 
views of the deployed services (e.g. a schema components-based view; a 
development / source control view; a system architecture / backend 
components view) - these additional views are not necessarily something 
that one can standardise, but within a standardised framework like 
topic maps, it is easy enough to express and process those views,

> We could treat event types as topic types.  I have to wrap
> my head around that idea a bit more to see what utility that
> could have.  Hmmm... if everything is a topic, then events
> are topics, human rights are topics, and the intersections
> of these are... topics?
>

<plug class="gratuitous">
I've been doing something like this for the past few months on a 
day-by-day topic map of Pepys diary. There is a lot more on this 
subject on my blog at 
http://www.techquila.com/blog/archives/cat_pepys_diary.html. See also 
the (fairly basic) HTML rendition of the topic map at 
http://www.techquila.com/pepysmap/html/.
</plug>

Slightly more relevantly, I have used the wikipedia to provide some of 
the topic subject indicators in that topic map. As a global community 
resource, freely accessible and openly managed, wikipedia is a great 
source of subject descriptions.

> Of course, I'm still contemplating what I bent some ears
> with at XML 2004:  the notion that a uniform set of human
> rights should be created for the WWW based perhaps on an
> ontology of event types.  It seems to me that event types
> are a core piece of Daconta's venn diagram intersection
> of 'relevance'.
>
That sounds interesting - though the notion of creating a uniform set 
of human rights is far more problematic than an ontology of event types 
(and the ontology bit is hard enough!)

Cheers,

Kal