Re: [topicmaps-comment] skills to create topic maps

[Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>]

[Glenda]
"What skills are needed/held by people creating topic maps. I understand
the linguistic/conceptual side of it, but I am wondering about the technical
creation. Eg, do you need XML, programming skills or whatever?"

[Thomas]
"I think the linguistic/conceptual side is the most important aspect.
Even in the field of topic maps the old wisdom is valid: garbage in - garbage
out."

Hear, hear! not *even*, but *more than ever* :)
TM have no more magic than any knowledge representation tool,
the main requirement is to have some (good and structured) knowledge available
...
OTOH turning your knowledge legacy into a TM generally is helpful to improve
the quality and clarity of this organization, and at least pushes you into a new
perspective
that often lead to refine vocabulary of concepts and relationships.

[Thomas]
"Most of the user communities have some thesaurus or classification to start
with."

Sure! And you've better start from there than reinvent the wheel ...

But it's not obvious for beginners to figure how to turn efficiently
a thesaurus or classification into a TM structure.
One thing is to understand the principle of how you turn your set of categories
and (usually binary) relationships into topics and (potentially n-ary)
associations.
Once you have figured that on a sample - which can be quite a quick process
for knowledge(able) engineers - another thing is to process the entire legacy
where you deal with thousands of objects at least ...
There you get to go technical and have efficient and scalable solutions!

And industrial developments will need standards and/or software
solutions to do that in a simple and efficient way.
I suppose the tool you develop, Thomas, is along those lines?

Regards

Bernard

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Bernard Vatant - Consultant
Mondeca - "Making Sense of Content"
www.mondeca.com
bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
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