-----Original Message----- From: John McClure [mailto:jmcclure@hypergrove.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 4:48 AM To: 'Yury Katkov'; 'Wikimedia developers' Subject: RE: [Wikitech-l] Topic Maps
Yury, Sure SMW certainly could be part of a solution especially using subobjects from v1.7, but this suggests WP isn't intended to have something as basic as a subject-index itself because SMW is apparently not on WP's roadmap. If WP doesn't record topics for its articles, then WP cannot fully leverage its library of data in the semantic web. IMHO I think the semantic web is more fruitfully about merging and contrasting topic maps than resource descriptions.
On implementation, I see two parts. First, are hierarchical subject indexes (such as the LCSH)based on SKOS [3] and second are topic maps that are roundtripped XTM v2.0 [2] within the scope of <page> elements. "All the other" plumbing is significant enough though to make this work. For instance, I'd consider requiring "type" designators in XTM stream to be names of (aliased+actual) namespaces. The suggests a more dynamic namespace manager which I know has been kicking around for awhile.
Bottom line if SMW were to be incorporated into WP then it's a fine idea to use SMW to hold topic data. If not, I am concerned that platforms without semantics don't seem sustainable over the long haul.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_Maps [2] http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-xtm/ [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-referenc
Thank - John
-----Original Message----- From: ganqturgon@gmail.com [mailto:ganqturgon@gmail.com]On Behalf Of Yury Katkov Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2012 7:50 PM To: jmcclure@hypergrove.com; Wikimedia developers Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Topic Maps
Hi John! Could you provide some links on how the Topic Maps are used in modern wikis and information systems? There is a big family of Semantic Extensions [1] that allow to export wikipages to RDF, isn't this enough?
[1] http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:SMW_extensions
Yury Katkov
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 6:53 AM, John McClure jmcclure@hypergrove.com wrote:
Adding Topic Maps to MW base software could be a winner --
it can generate a
wiki-site map (some think WP needs one!); it can be used to
corelate the
contents of documents loaded into a wiki (like conference
proceedings) with
a wiki's topic map; and would make a cool tool for any page
in a wiki, most
clearly on a user page. It's perhaps a smart strategic move
- ISO 82250
Topic Maps are the fruit of SGML/Hytime n-ary models that
'lost' to RDF
triples back when. Being a superset of RDF, TMs can type associations between articles while capturing all infobox data.
Topic maps may be a compelling FUNCTIONAL upgrade for MW as
it captures
subjects of an article for the first time. Given topic-map
to RDF transforms
amid continuing W3 research, this could be enough for the
semantic world. By
adopting say the Lib of Congress' Subject Headings, a wiki
like Wikipedia
could play an important role in the semantic web. The
current situation with
Wikipedia is that it's hard to have a large library of
information without a
subject catalogue... right now, wikis have an author
catalogue sort of, fine
for smaller hadcrafted wikis but doesn't scale well for many.
Since other platforms now have maturing topic map extensions
I'm worried the
impact on wikis not to have that technology.
John McClure
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