Re: [xtm-wg] How can a large chunk of documents and data can be structured

[Steve Pepper <pepper@ontopia.net>]

At 01:16 18.07.2001 -0700, Anil Kumar wrote:
>            I am facing a problem of how to make a
>topicmap out of a large chunk of data and documents
>available to me. As a developer I dont know which data
>for eg. of a topic in library/book is related to
>others and how they are related and what are to be the
>possible relationship between them.

As a developer it's not your job to know the semantics of
the data you are working with! For a project like this to
be successful, there *must* be collaboration between
documentalists (indexers, librarians, etc.), developers,
subject matter experts, and knowledge engineers.

The involvement of subject matter experts is critical.
A topic map represents a portion of the knowledge in the
domain covered by the information resources, and without
subject matter expertise, the result will be next to
useless.

Note also that the team should also include topic map
expertise and experience in knowledge engineering.

Conventional cataloging know-how is not enough, and may even
be an impediment. Librarians need to overcome their ingrained
habits of viewing everything in terms of subject area
categories. This is not because topic maps can't support that
kind of categorisation -- they can.

The problem is that people with a library science background
tend to think too much in terms of hierarchies composed of
simple "topic/subtopic" relationships. Topic maps allow you
to express much richer relationship types, and it takes some
experience to tease these out of the data and the experts!

>           Does all the above work need to be done
>before making a topicmap/xtm file or how do we go
>about to make a topicmap/xtm file if we are given a
>variety of documents,data and files.

In my experience, the more analysis, design, and modelling
of the information domain that you do up front, the quicker
you arrive at a useful end-result. Consult the documents,
data, and files as part of that process, of course. But
don't start doing development work until your topic map
"ontology" (essentially, the set of topic types, association
types, and occurrence types) has been worked out.

By the way (plug), I am covering all of this in my tutorial
on "Modelling Topic Maps" at the Extreme Markup conference in
Montreal on Monday August 13th. This is the blurb:

   This highly interactive tutorial is for people who already
   know that topic maps are something for them, who understand
   the basic concepts, and who are ready to create their first
   real topic map application or prototype. It focuses
   exclusively on issues of analysis and modelling, and teaches
   a methodology for designing topic map ontologies. Whether
   your application relates to information management, knowledge
   management, or application integration, this tutorial will
   provide you with a head start and help you avoid the most
   common traps and pitfalls.

For more details, see

  http://www.extrememarkup.net/extreme/2001/monday.htm#pepper

I hope to see you there!

Best regards,

Steve

--
Steve Pepper, Chief Executive Officer <pepper@ontopia.net>
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34/WG3  Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps)
Ontopia AS, Waldemar Thranes gt. 98, N-0175 Oslo, Norway.
http://www.ontopia.net/ phone: +47-23233080 GSM: +47-90827246


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