[topicmaps-comment] Introduction

[Eric Freese <eric@isogen.com>]

Hello, Eric Freese here!

I am a founding member of TopicMaps.Org and served as chair (otherwise known
as chief cat herder).  I am currently the interim chair of the
(soon-to-be-formed, I hope) TopicMaps.Org member section within OASIS.  In
my other life, I am a senior consultant with ISOGEN International.

I have been interested in Topic Maps since taking a class taught by Steve
and Michel.  However, before that, in the early 90's, I wrote and presented
a paper on the use of SGML to mark up and interchange semantic network
information.  I didn't do very much work on the concept until I learned
about topic maps and the 2 suddenly seemed to make sense.

This is the basis for my work on a tool I call SemanText
(www.semantext.com).  It is a topic map enabled system which builds a
semantic network from the topic map information.  It also contains a
rudimentary inference engine which allows rules to be applied to the
information to create new information.  The latest twist I'm playing with is
using natural language processing to build topic maps.  At some point I
would like to set up a system that works like the Star Trek computers,
including speech interfaces (using VoiceXML), etc.

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