Semantic Bleachers: was Re: Afghanistan War Diary as topic map in Maiana
Patrick Durusau <patrick-Q/[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.text.xml.xtm.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Lars, On Fri, 2010-10-29 at 07:58 +0200, Lars Heuer wrote: > Hi Patrick, > > [...] > > I think Lars meant that holding data in topic map format, without more, > > isn't very interesting > [...] > > Exactly. Translating something literally to Topic Maps is not > interesting. WikiLeaks on Topic Maps would be interesting. > Well, not even that. Wilileaks using topic maps to integrate its "leaked" information with other data held by it or by others would be interesting. That is to honor the promise of topic maps to navigate information about the same subjects across multiple locations and representations. Unfortunately, that is also hard work, which I suspect is why there are so few public topic maps in that sense of the word. Most of us (myself included), are very good at exhorting others to make the effort, which we judge, from the safety of the semantic bleachers. Although it is an old suggestion, that pops up every now and again, why don't we do a public topic map project? On the order of the Apache projects, where we have one or more project leads, a repository, a blog to tout successes, failures, etc. The Afghanistan War Diary would be good but many of us lack the expertise, background and interest to contribute to its substance. Someone on this list may have that expertise so it could be one of a such projects. To start out I would suggest no more than two or three projects since we remain a small but growing community. Suggestions on general themes/data sets? Something to think about over the weekend. Hope everyone is looking forward to a great weekend! Patrick PS: While such a project could be displayed or even edited at Maiana if some participant wanted to, I prefer traditional revision control. Mostly so that people can use their own local tools, visualizations, etc. The broader the experience with the resulting topic map, for editing, processing, display, the stronger it will be. Not to get too far ahead but there could be sub-maps for particular interests, persons, places, etc. that are later merged into the larger map.