steven r. newcomb edited by jongnam kim
DESCRIPTION
Chapter3: A Perspective on the Quest for Global Knowledge Interchange. Steven R. Newcomb Edited by Jongnam Kim. Table of Contents. Information Is Interesting Stuff Information and structure Are Inseparable - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
SNUOOPSLA Lab.
Chapter3: A Perspective on the Quest for Global Knowledge Interchange
Steven R. Newcomb
Edited by Jongnam Kim
SNUOOPSLA 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
SNUOOPSLA 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
?
SNUOOPSLA 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
SNUOOPSLA 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”
SNUOOPSLA 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
SNUOOPSLA 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
SNUOOPSLA Lab.8
Generic Markup Makes Natural Languages More Formal (2/3)
Procedural markup
<italics>Command Center</italics>
Helpful for a rendering application But, useless for supporting applications that are
looking for occurrences of the names of building
SNUOOPSLA Lab.9
Generic Markup Makes Natural Languages More Formal (3/3)
Generic markup
<building-name>bunker</building-name>
Says, “The next characters are the name of a building,”
Generic tag can support many more kinds of applications
Information-oriented, not application-oriented
SNUOOPSLA 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 13250 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” <topic> element type – totally unnecessary,
but got a popularity
SNUOOPSLA Lab.11
A Brief History of the Topic Maps Paradigm (2/2)
ISO 13250 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
SNUOOPSLA 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…
SNUOOPSLA 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
SNUOOPSLA Lab.14
Example
‘Starcraft’ Information Space
Mineral 400
scan 50
love Medic
“Additional SupplyDepot is required.”
SNUOOPSLA 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
SNUOOPSLA 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
SNUOOPSLA 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