Re: Afghanistan War Diary as topic map in Maiana

Merging it with other sources would indeed be where things would get powerful.

A place with a lot of data that might be suitably merged in, is this site here:
http://cooperativeresearch.org/

I've thought for a long time that some sort of topic maps merging/parsing of their data would be an awesome project, but never had time to take it on.

There data is already processed with 'entities' and 'dates' etc but not in topic map format. It is also available in various xml formats and they release it as 'open content' though I'm not sure what license applies.

They even have an Afghanistan timeline
http://www.historycommons.org/project.jsp?project=afghanwar 

It may be a great project for a student or someone to try and merge the two data sources for the greater good?

Miles


-----Original Message-----
From: topicmapmail-bounces-Zo64W7twoUFWk0Htik3J/[email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dr. Lutz Maicher
Sent: Friday, 29 October 2010 9:55 a.m.
To: Lars Heuer
Cc: topicmapmail-Zo64W7twoUFWk0Htik3J/[email protected]
Subject: Re: [topicmapmail] Afghanistan War Diary as topic map in Maiana

Hi Lars,

at the first glance you are right. You see a transformation of the 
wikileaks information (published as CSV) into a topic map. Even this 
small step allows you to make more complex queries than you can usually 
formulate against a spreadsheet. But this is only one part of the story.

The more interesting point - and now we are approaching the added value 
- is the possibility to merge background knowledge into the diary. In 
example the "plain" translation of the diary into the topic map does not 
allow to query "all reports [with certain properties] 150 km around 
Kandahar". The reason is, that no relationship between reports and 
explicit cities is stored in the data.

With the diary as topic map this problem is now very smoothly solvable. 
We have created an "Afghanistan city map" which is a topic map, 
containing 10 topics for the 10 largest cities in Afghanistan, their 
names and their coordinates. That's all, no further associations. When 
you merge the city map with the (plain) diary map you will be able to 
query for topics of type report which have a distance of less than 150 
km from the topic for Kandahar. Quite simple, but powerful. And you not 
only can add a list of cities, but you also can add topics of schools, 
topics of hospitals or topics of mobile access points. Immediately you 
can query for reports which were close to a school or a hospital.  I 
hope this example discloses the power of the approach.

And in Maiana each user can create its own containers to add specific 
background knowledge to the war diary. You might be interested in 
schools, I might be interested in hospitals, others want to merge in 
information from news companies. The containers in Maiana provide huge 
flexibility to add background knowledge customized to the needs of each 
user.

Do you now see some added value?

Greetings from Leipzig,
Lutz

Am 28.10.2010 22:18, schrieb Lars Heuer:
> Hi Lutz,
>> there is a new topic map available in Maiana which might be in interest
>> for you. Under [1] you will find the 2004 time slice of the Afghanistan
>> War Diary. The original data is purchased by WikiLeaks; we transformed
> Great. But where is the additional value?
>
> Someone converted the WikiLeaks somehow to a topic map. Great...
>
> If I look at the topic map through Maiana I see a translation of the
> WikiLeaks report. Again, where is the additional value if a user sees
> an occurrences like (among like other duplicates):
>
>      [...]
>      * 2004-01-02 00:00:00 : SURV Other
>      * 2004-01-02 00:00:00 : SURV Other
>      [...]
>
> Where is the additional value of using Topic Maps?
>
> Don't understand me wrong, WikiLeaks on Topic Maps would be great, but
> the current translation of WikiLeaks sounds like a 1:1 mapping of
> MARC(XML) to Topic Maps.
>
> Best regards,
> Lars

-- 
______________________________________________

Dr. Lutz Maicher
Sprecher des Topic Maps Labs
Abteilung Automatische Sprachverarbeitung
Institut für Informatik | Universität Leipzig
Johannisgasse 26 | Raum 00-05 | 04103 Leipzig

phone: 0049 - 341 - 97 - 32205
fax:   0049 - 341 - 97 - 32299
mail:  maicher-jNDFPZUTrfTw9Zu3TmXbXSJk02hg1TJes0AfqQuZ5sE@public.gmane.org
http://www.topicmapslab.de/people/Lutz_Maicher

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    "Information wants to be a topic map"
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