SNU OOPSLA Lab. Chapter3: A Perspective on the Quest for Global Knowledge Interchange Steven R. Newcomb Edited by Jongnam Kim

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 2 Table of Contents Information Is Interesting Stuff Information and structure Are Inseparable Formal Languages Are Easier to Compute Than Natural Languages Generic Markup Makes Natural Languages More Formal A Brief History of the Topic Maps Paradigm Data and Metadata: The Resource-Centric View Subjects and Data: The Subject-Centric View Understanding Sophisticated Markup Vocabularies The Topic Maps Attitude Summary

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 3 Information Is Interesting Stuff (1/2) Relationship Between information and the material universe (reality) Mineral-ness Mineral Influenced the design of the topic maps paradigm ?

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 4 Information Is Interesting Stuff (2/2) The topic maps paradigm recognizes, adapts itself to, and exploits this chasm Universe of Information Universe of Subjects Human Intuition chasm

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 5 Information and structure Are Inseparable Natural languages == “ unstructured ” ? Even the simplest kind of information has a sequence Beginning, middle, end Concept of Unit, hierarchical levels No such thing as “ unstructured information ”

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 6 Formal Languages Are Easier to Compute Than Natural Languages Formal Language Expressively impoverished language Involving everything that computers do You are unfamiliar with formal languages? Dialing a telephone number Web addresses

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 7 Generic Markup Makes Natural Languages More Formal (1/3) XML, like SGML, allows users to define their own markup vocabularies “ How can global knowledge interchange be supported? ” interchangeable info = sequence of char Key: standard and user-specifiable Predominance of SGML and XML Notion of generic markup, as opposed to procedural markup

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 8 Generic Markup Makes Natural Languages More Formal (2/3) Procedural markup Command Center Helpful for a rendering application But, useless for supporting applications that are looking for occurrences of the names of building

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 9 Generic Markup Makes Natural Languages More Formal (3/3) Generic markup bunker Says, “ The next characters are the name of a building, ” Generic tag can support many more kinds of applications Information-oriented, not application-oriented

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 10 A Brief History of the Topic Maps Paradigm (1/2) Began in 1991 by Davenport Group Need to be able to merge indexes ISO/IEC Topics and relationships between topics Relationship -> association Facet, scope (key feature of TM) Biezunski ’ s Principle “ There is no point in creating a standard that nobody can understand ” element type – totally unnecessary, but got a popularity

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 11 A Brief History of the Topic Maps Paradigm (2/2) ISO standard Finalized in 1999 Published in January 2000 TopicMaps.Org creating & publishing an XTM 1.0 spec Core of the XTM 1.0 spec XML 2000 conference in Washington, DC, on December 4, 2000, Final version of XTM 1.0 on March 2, 2001

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 12 Data and Metadata: The Resource-Centric View Metadata Being “ in orbit ” around the data Ironically more and more information inaccessible Sheer quantity of it ( “ infoglut ” ) Search engines Metadata web sites Categorization of information resources Metametadata, Metametametadata …

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 13 Subjects and Data: The Subject-Centric View Platonic forms Underlying layer Subject Hub around which data resources can orbit Resource-centric view Metadata orbits data resources Subject-centric view Data orbits subjects Problem Computers cannot access subjects unless those subjects happen to be information resources themselves Communicate symbolically

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 14 Example ‘ Starcraft ’ Information Space Mineral 400 scan 50 love Medic “ Additional Supply Depot is required. ”

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 15 Understanding Sophisticated Markup Vocabularies In 1986, SGML had just adopted as the one-and – only markup language for everything Problem of representing music abstractly Musical works are multidimensional Currently, regard XML as an opportunity to represent relational databases as interchangeable documents Document Object Model (DOM) Only provide direct access to the syntactic components of how a document is represented for interchange

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 16 The Topic Maps Attitude A step along the road to global knowledge interchange Will owe much of its success to the fact that it is responsive to current technological, economic, and anthropological conditions, and just as responsive to certain philosophical values and attitudes Comparatively young traditions of the markup languages community

SNU OOPSLA Lab. 17 Summary Topic maps provide us with two different and important views into an information space Resource-centric view Use metadata to describe the resources we reference with topics Subject-centric view Topic maps provide the tools necessary to represent, to “ talk about ” subjects