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

[Hector Urroz <h.urroz@att.net>]

Jean:

I'm interested in automatic tagging, and I see you mentioned some tools in
your email, can you point me to them?

Thanks,

Hector Urroz

----- Original Message -----
From: "jean delahousse" <jean.delahousse@mondeca.com>
To: <Tony.Coates@reuters.com>; <webindexing@optusnet.com.au>; "Topic Maps"
<topicmaps-comment@lists.oasis-open.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2001 3:13 PM
Subject: RE: [topicmaps-comment] skills to create topic maps


Dear Tony and all,

I like harsh talking and I will be happy to have some time to talk with you
at Orlando and drink a beer.

We start to accumulate some experience with professionnal clients on
building topic maps and I like to give you a feed back

1) we use our Topic Maps repository to gather the information, publish it
and navigate on the organised content

2) the repository accept manual inputs of information used espacially to
build and maintain the taxonomy or for experts that gather information
"manually" ("M.Coates works for Reuters", for example)

3) the repository accept XTM file inputs so we were able :

- to take information from data bases (project organisation, financial links
between companies)
- to input existing taxonomies, thesaurus, ontologies
- to input summary, index and links between documents coming from large
legal documentation and to index the content
- to input informations coming from automatic tagging tools ("Reuters
acquired Diagram and now controls 43% of the french market of financial
software" automaticaly transformed in topics, associations and occurences)
and build economic intelligence repository
- to input metadata from RDF DC documents

4) before to populate the Topic Map whith information we have to choose a
set of association templates and types of occurence. We had at the beginning
a lot of back and forth work trying to adjust the templates but we now have
more experience and the corporate vocabulary is finally not that large.

We still have a lot of work to do to get a full set of templates for
corporate fields. For that work we get inspiration from standardisation
works and exiting ontologies

5) concerning taxonomy to organise and classify subjects and documents, we
sometime rely on exiting vocabulary (legal and financial documentation) or
by building a first simple taxonomy and changing it when it is needed.

We start a work of automatisation of the taxonomy creation using a
classification tools from a partner. It will give a first proposition of
taxonomy that the users may modify and complete.

6) Conclusion :
Topic Maps gives enough flexibility to use various organisation methods for
a content (ontology, taxonomie, semantic links between topics,
class/instance relationships, links to organise piece of documents,
reification...) which is quite nice.

Professional content editors have hundreds years of experience on content
organisation for books, memento, encyclopedia, thesaurus so they can tell
the result they want (at least as good as what they had in the paper
publication).

So flexible repository (mondeca's one obviously), TM standards and existing
organised content on the client side make all together the work feasable,
interesting, fun, professional, extremely valuable and gives very good
results and a good ROI for the clients.

Sincerely

Jean Delahousse
CEO
www.mondeca.com

-----Message d'origine-----
De : Tony.Coates@reuters.com [mailto:Tony.Coates@reuters.com]
Envoyé : mercredi 28 novembre 2001 13:19
À : webindexing@optusnet.com.au
Cc : topicmaps-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Objet : Re: [topicmaps-comment] skills to create topic maps



On 28/11/2001 07:49:45 Jon Jermey & Glenda Browne wrote:

>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?

I'll add to what the other respondents have written by saying that in the
long term, knowing how to work with XML directly should not be a
requirement.  However, given the immature state of topic map tools (which is
complicated by the lack of an agreed processing model), I would not expect
anyone to make sufficient progress without a knowledge of XML.

To be more concrete, you might be able to settle on one of the available
topic map editors, and just edit away happily without understanding XML.
However, at some stage you will want to do something with that topic map,
and that is the stage where you might have to look at the XML and make some
sense of it.  If you stick to one vendor's toolset you might be lucky enough
to avoid this, but I would be less confident if you are trying to build a
topic map that can be used equally by any tool (leave aside one you can use
with XSL-T or other generic XML tools).

Topic map tools vendors are welcome to comment if they think this evaluation
is too harsh, and/or to buttonhole me at XML 2001.

     Cheers,
          Tony.
========
Anthony B. Coates
(1) Content Distribution Architect - Project Gazelle
(2) Leader of XML Architecture & Design - Chief Technology Office
Reuters Plc, London.
Tony.Coates@reuters.com
========



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