Re: Afghanistan War Diary as topic map in Maiana

Hi Benjamin and all

Your experiences with AWD sound very similar to my experiences building 
Topic Maps extractors. Transferring loosely structured information to 
Topic Maps results inevitable not-so-good topic map. However, I have 
personally stopped worrying about it. In my opinion Topic Maps can 
easily handle both unstructured text and complex association structures 
-- even simultaneusly. And, in my opinion, we should start discussing 
topic map refactoring. If I have a not-so-good topic map, how can I make 
it better -- not necessarily automatically but as a guided process. 
Merge is an obvious operation enriching content, but I have a feeling 
there is numerous other topic-map-editing-patterns that can help the 
editor to enhance her topic map. Finding such editing-patterns, and 
creating tools for them would advance the overall acceptance of Topic 
Maps as a true choice for information refinement.

Kind Regards,
Aki / Wandora Team

ps. Great work!



On 29.10.2010 11:49, Benjamin Bock wrote:
> Hi Lars,
>
> The work presented is just a simple conversion after some minimal data
> cleaning. While the short text occurrences where cleaned, the long
> text passages where not cleaned up and are full of typos. Besides
> "Taliban" you find also "Talibah", "Tali-ban", "Talib", "Taliwan",
> "Talibjan" and so on. Without detailed domain knowledge, we don't know
> which are same and which are different. There are also "Taliban Flag",
> "Taliban Check Point", etc. in the texts - should these be connected
> to the Taliban Topic? If so - how?
> Also, these texts are full of military speech and names of people and
> places. Both again, often misspelled, transliterated in different ways
> - or are they actually different subjects? How should we know? Running
> a generic spell checker on these doesn't make things better. Garbage
> In, Garbage Out.
>
> As pointed out by others: You can easily add subjects and data
> yourself and use the predefined TMQL functions like the distance to
> get more information out - it would be nice of you showed how to do
> that in Excel with a CSV file.
> If you feel like you're more of a military expert than we are, or if
> you know Afghanistan, its localities, its inhabitants and how they're
> called by different parties, you're free to produce a semantically
> rich topic map.
>
> Our mission was just to show that you can convert data to Topic Maps
> with barely any effort and that you can go on from there doing things
> you care about with the data, like querying reports around cities.
>
> Many people still think "Topic Maps" is something like "Google Maps"
> and this is just one way of showing them what it really is.
>
> Benjamin
>
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Lars Heuer<[email protected]>  wrote:
>> Hi Marcel,
>>
>> [...]
>>> In short: converting raw material into Topic Maps (or RDF) makes it easier
>>> to apply ontologies. And with this enhanced data we can merge other sources
>>> like "George W. Bush"-ish sources. Or?
>>
>> Yes, you can. And adding more useful topics/subjects to the WikiLeaks
>> Afghanistan topic map was/is my point. I want to see "Taliban",
>> "Kabul", "Mazari Sharif" and the relationships. I see "Kabul" and
>> "Mazari Sharif" but no relationships. They are cities and they have
>> coordinates... . Hmm ...
>>
>> Maybe I was too harsh/not specific enough with the criticism of the
>> topic map, but having something as topic map is not a value of its
>> own. If the topic map is developed further it may become more useful.
>> Currently, it consists mainly of (IMO) not very useful occurrences
>> which are a literally translation of CSV data.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Lars
>> --
>> Semagia
>> <http://www.semagia.com>
>>
>> <http://www.topicmaps.de/mailinglist/>  German Topic Maps mailing list
>> <http://tinytim.sourceforge.net/>  Open Source Topic Maps engine
>> <http://mappa.semagia.com/>  Mappa - Python Topic Maps engine
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