Re: The AF war diary

Lars,

I think Robert's request, although he says RDBMS schema, etc., is what
sort of topic map would we create that would be more useful than the one
under discussion. 

Rehashing that the one in Maiana a reflection of an SQL dump isn't going
to advance the conversation. I think we all agree you are correct. Well,
most of us anyway. ;-)

Aki has a good point that occurrence data in such an topic map SQL dump
can be the *starting point for further refinement.* And he actually
posted refinement data to Maiana. 

Sure, I think the TopicMaps Lab should be the origin of such refinement
but apparently they have other priorities.

My concern is how to demonstrate the use of topic maps in making
information like the AF war diaries actionable. 

At best, they are now just the stuff of party jokes and public
titillation over "secret" documents. 

Because topic maps can marshal the analysis of multiple
experts/reviewers, local sources of information, matched to Western
reports (or non-reports) of incidents, not to mention tracking those
involved if you have the un-edited version, then the AF war diaries
become actionable intelligence. 

As Robert points out, nothing new, could be done with a spiral notebook
and some pencils, but would take a lot longer and be more costly. 

If I were building an "in-country" resource, it would be an phone app
that had interviews with family members of civilian KIAs for specific
locations and the matching AF war diary accounts translated into the
local language. 

Good to know all views. 

Not a sophisticated use of a topic map but not every topic map can trace
the evolution of string theory across multiple mathematical dialects, to
say nothing of natural languages. 

Hope you are looking forward to a great weekend!

Patrick


On Fri, 2011-01-28 at 10:52 +0100, Lars Heuer wrote:
> Hi Robert,
> 
> [...]
> > Let's turn things around! Why don't you create a RDBMS application
> > with some code and put it online. I would be curious to see the data
> > schema
> [...]
> 
> The DB schema of the source for the TM is:
> 
>     CREATE TABLE war_diary (ReportKey varchar(255), Date varchar(255),
>     Type varchar(255), Category varchar(255), TrackingNumber
>     varchar(255), Title text, Summary text, Region varchar(255),
>     AttackOn varchar(255), ComplexAttack varchar(255), ReportingUnit
>     varchar(255), UnitName varchar(255), TypeOfUnit varchar(255),
>     FriendlyWIA varchar(255), FriendlyKIA varchar(255), HostNationWIA
>     varchar(255), HostNationKIA varchar(255), CivilianWIA
>     varchar(255), CivilianKIA varchar(255), EnemyWIA varchar(255),
>     EnemyKIA varchar(255), EnemyDetained varchar(255), MGRS
>     varchar(255), Latitude varchar(255), Longitude varchar(255),
>     OriginatorGroup varchar(255), UpdatedByGroup varchar(255), CCIR
>     varchar(255), Sigact varchar(255), Affiliation varchar(255),
>     DColor varchar(255), Classification varchar(255));
> 
> Obviously, it is not a well designed schema, though. ;)
> 
> Anyway, we already have web interfaces to the DB, i.e.:
> <http://warlogs.owni.fr/> and <http://213.251.145.96/iraq/diarydig/>.
> 
> The latter is also available as Open Source project:
> <https://github.com/yourcelf/afgexplorer>
> 
> [...]
> > i would like to compare development time
> [...]
> 
> Which development time? The development time to create the AfgExplorer
> or to create the topic map from the above mentioned schema? I don't
> know how long it took to create the explorer, but creating the topic
> map from the RDBMS source would take ca. 15min (see below for a
> comparison of the source and the generated topic map).

<snip>