[topicmaps-comment] Topic Map Designer and its ilk

[Gennadi Bedjanian <gbedja@dsnet.net>]

Several threads were triggered by Ivan's "Can subjectIdentity elements
guarantee topic identity?"
Here's another viewpoint with a new bent and a hint at a solution.

The discussion about "eternal/changing subject identities", "one
notion - one topic subject", "situatedness" and on, reminds of the
language - speech dichotomy. Dictionary meanings of words belong to
the static language system, while in speech words acquire "situated"
meanings. They influence each other but never fully coincide. In the
dynamic speech realm individuals do things together, verbally
communicate to do things more effectively, and arrive at accepted
meanings.

If a participant in a communication (= topic map) has a wrong
understading of a meaning (= topic subject) then something happens
that makes him rectify the fallacy. For a major misunderstanding it's
communication breakdown, for a minor - some kind of built-in
redundancy sustains the communication while the misconcept is
corrected. Collective communication created the natural language with
its dictionary and speech as a means to keep the dictionary up-to-date.

As far as I know, TMs do not interact a lot nowadays. And a TM without
interaction is like its author talking to himself. Assigning topics to
subjects in unassailable solitude. Creating his own dictionary.

Hence the importance of creating communities of TM producers who
exchange TMs and arrive at consensuses on not-so-clear issues. Not
through human negotiations but the TMs themselves filter out what is
irrelevant. That's the "market principle" that blazes the trail for
science. A sort of Japanese way with AI. Let's first put it into
washing machines and gadgets, and eventually it may grow into
something big. Meanwhile we'll have fun with "intelligent" cellphones,
household appliances and so on.

A boost to such communities would be a TM / knowledge editor. Creating
a TM manually is too laborous for mass production of TMs. It must be
done automatically in the background. The software must follow the
user and do all the dirty work. The researcher / user should be able
to draw conceptual (topical) structures, work with texts, tag-extract
words-concepts right from the text and see visualizations of evolving
models based on the TM that he is constructing (BTW without
necessarily knowing TM specs).

It may sound far-fetched but many of these features are already
implemented in Topic Map Designer. It's not a finished product, but
it's the right start. Ronald Heckel wrote it for his diploma. As
usual, it takes a student.
http://www.topicmap-design.com/en/topicmap-designer.htm

Why there is no such software? Or maybe I don't know about it? Not
demos of industrial systems, but something handy.

To pick up the language analogy, it took a lot of talking before the
first dictionary with static words appeared. And even its entries
change, only gradually.

I'm not sure if Topic Maps were intended as a tool for masses, but I
have a strong suspicion that their full potential cannot be realized
without the Internet collective thinking.

Gen Bedjanian