Report on the Open Space Sessions

This report summarizes the eleven contributions by eight presenters from the two open space sessions that took place during the TMRA’05 workshop on 6 and 7 of October 2005. The contributions were informal and nonrefereed, since workshop attendants had been given the opportunity to sign up to short talks on a flipchart, and the suggested format for each presentation was: only one slide, five minutes presentation, and five minutes discussion. The 90 minutes, smoothly chaired by Lars Marius Garshol, were filled with an inspiring exchange of ideas and arguments, since in this “playground for visionaries” new proposals were made and current work in progress was reported and lively discussed. For the purpose of this report, the presentations have been regrouped into the five sections: 1. Resources for the topic maps research community, 2. Authoring topic maps, 3. Querying topic maps, 4. A PSI infrastructure for topic maps, and finally, 5. Topic maps applications. 1. Resources for the Topic Maps Research Community bibMap: The Bibliography of the Topic Maps Technology Literature Since one of main objectives of the TMRA’05 workshop was “to chart the landscape of topic maps research”, Lutz Maicher, University of Leipzig, created bibMap, an attempt to capture all known research references to the topic maps technology literature, represented in one topic map. This bibliographic topic map contains 95 persons and 194 sources (version 1.0 revision 1.3.3 of 2005-08-22). It is published in LTM (and also available in XTM) format and can be freely used. To deploy it (e.g. for literature research), it may be loaded into a freely available topic maps browser such as the 1 The corresponding slides for all presentations can be retrieved from http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~tmra05/prog.html#OSS1 and http://www.informatik. uni-leipzig.de/~tmra05/prog.html#OSS2. In the preparation of this report, the following two blog entries about this session, published by the session chair, have been used: http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/8.html and http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/9.html. In addition, comments by the presenters about an earlier draft of this report have been taken into account. 2 http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~maicher/bibliography.html 3 http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~maicher/bib/bibmap_latest.ltm 4 http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~maicher/bib/bibmap_latest.xtm and http://www.topicmaps.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=cache&media=topic_maps%3Abibmap.xtm TM4J/TMNav or the Omnigator, or be viewed online with Tmwiki, developed by Hendrik Thomas (see below). You are also free to write your own application using bibMap. To maintain consistency, modification of the original bibMap is not allowed. In order to extend it with your own documented (subjective) view of the topic maps research literature, you may create your own topic map (with categories, annotations, and comments) and merge it with bibMap. Exchanging such extensions with others in the topic maps community and merging further extensions in is highly encouraged. Please contact Lutz Maicher if you want to collaborate with him on improving bibMap. 2. Authoring Topic Maps TMEP Disclosure: Disclosing the Process of the Topic Maps Engineering In order to ease the maintenance of huge topic maps (like his bibMap), Lutz Maicher advocates to also disclose the observation principle applied during the topic map generation, i.e. to document the principles by which a topic map is created. A schema is not sufficient for this purpose, as the editorial guidelines need also to be documented. If a schema, for example, defines that a topic of type “person” exists, a maintainer of the topic map would want to know when such a topic has to be created and how a person should be described accurately. A TMEP disclosure is a topic map which describes the editing process (the observation of the environment) motivating the topic map modifications. It consists of a set of action items which direct an interactive editing interface. The action items are: action directive, action sequence and action container. A TMEP disclosure defines an operator, an operand and a slot for the result, as well as conditions and the previous action item if the condition holds. Lutz Maicher demonstrated his current TMEP disclosure implementation, using the console, and the corresponding large LTM topic map. A TMEP disclosure is useful to drive generic topic map editing interfaces (customizing the editing interface with TMEP), to disclose how automatic indexing functions (like e.g. in the Semantic Talk [1] system which creates indices of real-time speech streams) were used to improve later integration of indices, and to describe arbitrary workflows. Tmwiki – a Topic Map wiki application Tmwiki, developed and presented by Hendrik Thomas, is: 1. a topic map-enhanced wiki system: wiki-like collaborative editing of XTM topic maps and browsing and viewing of topic maps with a generic graphical topic map browser (TMV, the “Topic Map Visualiser”) as a display and navigation interface; 5 http://www.topic-maps.org/cgi-bin/tmv_graph.pl?id=b1&path=bibmap.xtm 6 The acronym TMEP stands for: Topic Maps Editing Process, 7 See http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~tmra05/PRES/LMc.ppt, slide 3 8 http://www.topic-maps.org/projects:tmwiki 9 http://www.topic-maps.org/projects:tmv 2. content in this wiki about topic maps (information which someone needs to understand what topic maps are for and how they can be used). Tmwiki extends the PHP wiki DokuWiki (which stores all data in plain text files) by storing topic maps flattened into the file system, and by displaying them. As seen above, editing and viewing the bibMap topic map is one example. Another example is viewing the entry for this presentation in the TMRA’05 topic map, originally created by Robert Cerny. A clear advantage of Tmwiki is the capability for very easy and fast collaborative development of topic maps, supported by a versioning system and an RSS feed about changes. Current problems are consistency (the topic map may become confusing because additions by many users may lead to an unstructured topic map editing process), and that Tmwiki understands only XTM syntax, since XPath and no topic maps engine is used internally. AsTMa= 2.0: Authoring Topic Maps Lars Heuer held a 6-slide tutorial on latest developments towards AsTMa= (version 2.0), created by him and Robert Barta. The AsTMa* language family [3] is designed to support authoring, updating, constraining and querying topic maps. AsTMa= is the authoring language, and “=” stands for facts which authors state. Version 2.0 is almost ready, but some work remains to be done. AsTMa= supports definition of a topic by identifier, by subject locator and by subject identifier. An association can be defined as follows: General: