Alexander Johannesen, Bekk Consulting AS

DISCLAIMER : I love Topic Maps, and I get passionate about what I love. I think Topic Maps by itself will create peace on earth, solve world hunger and the energy crisis, so don’t expect me to dabble too much in the details. And, I love you.

• Monteverdi and baroque music• My wife pretending to understand me• My kids learn something that I value

highly• Seriously complex challenges• Enabling connotational knowledge

composer

Not classicalmusic!partnership

responsibility

Has a price

Measurementor

Opinion contextInformation science

• Monteverdi and baroque music• My wife pretending to understand me• My kids learn something that I value

highly• Seriously complex challenges• Enabling connotational knowledge

Epistemology

knowledge

storiesmeaninghumanity

history

culture

””Ferociously concerned with Ferociously concerned with the preservation and access the preservation and access

to knowledge”to knowledge”

Unique postition

Libraries are trusted to do the right thing

Keepers of knowledge and order

People who care

No nonsense, only truth

Nice, but firm

Global institution

2

Topic Maps mademe a better man

Forces me toPonder meaning of words and relationsFace modern IT problems differentlyDefine your solutions humanelyThink about what identity meansFocus on the information rather than

technologyRelive my philosophical past in perpetual

epistemology

Capturing knowledge in a way that’s easily dealt with by humans and computers alike

Ease knowledge representation and findability

Building an infrastructure for better cooperation of knowledge sharing

Something about ”subject-centric” or something …

What’s a subject?

“Anything whatsoever, regardless of whether it exists or has any other

specific characteristics, about which anything whatsoever may be asserted by

any means whatsoever”

What’s a subject?

Huh, I thought a topic was “anything”?

A subject can be anything, and a topic represents it

”Memories of Prague”

Semantic data model

Semantic- Meaning, meaningful, knowledge, idea, concept, sense

Data- Stuff, most often loosely based on reality

Modeling- exaggerated representation of parts of reality

RECAP

Models are concepts shaped by constraints

“freedom”

free

rights

duality

trapped

RECAP

Models are concepts shaped by constraints

“freedom”

free

rights

duality

trapped

Is_determined

Have_influence

Created_through

RECAP

PSI

“Alex” , “Alexander” , “Johannesen, Alex” #nla-resource-team-member #nla-resource-person #nla-resource-employee

http://psi.me.net/ego

“Alex” #nla-resource-personhttp://psi.me.net/ego

“Alexander” #nla-resource-team-member

http://psi.me.net/ego

“Johannesen, Alex” #nla-resource-employee

http://psi.me.net/ego

XY project My new app Fish ontology

Share your structures and data with outside sources as well

Fiddle Project

Dingbat Project

AustLit project

ontology

XY project My new app Fish ontology

“All models are wrong.

Some models are useful.”

-- George Box, statistiker, kjemiker

bull

head

legs

freedom

milk

It happens…

The idea of a category is central... Most symbols (i.e., words & representations)

do not designate particular things or individuals in the world... Most of our

words & concepts designate categories. There is nothing more basic than

categorization to our though, perception, action & speech. Every time we see

something as a kind of thing [...] we are categorizing Lakoff, ”Women, Fire and dangerous things”

an abstract container with things either inside or outside

clear boundaries defined by common properties of the

membersitems are in the same category if and only if they

have certain properties in common independent of who is doing the categorising no member of a category has any special

status all levels of a hierarchy are important and

equivalent

Categories?

[Classical category theory] is built into the foundations of mathematics and into much of our current computer software. Since mathematical and computer models are being used more and

more as intellectual tools in the cognitive sciences, it is not surprising that there is

considerable pressure to keep the traditional theory of classification at all costs. It fits the available intellectual tools, and abandoning it

would require the development of new intellectual tools. And retooling is no more popular in the

academy than in industry. Lakoff, ”Women, Fire and dangerous things”

Categories, reallyDerived from language; different languages

classify things differently; there’s no universal categories

Basic category theoryLakoff ”Women, Fire and Dangerous things”Chairs, where some chairs are more ”chair” than

othersCognitive perception limits things’ modality

which language further complicates ; we’re middle-sized beings with a knack for poetryHow can you understand how big the universe is

when you’ve lived in a cave your whole life …Models of understanding must be slowly built to

overcome the perspective; it’s a genetic thing

Categories are not merely organized in a hierarchy from the most general to the most specific, but are also organised so

that the categories that are most cognitively basic are "in the middle" of a

general-to-specific hierarchy. Generalisation proceeds upward from the

basic level and specialization proceeds down

A basic level category is roughly in the middle of a hierarchy

Learned earliest (how you teach kids)Usually has a short name in frequent usePeople are fast at identifying category

membersCategories have best - or prototypical -

examples, with some members of the category being more representative than other members

Most of our knowledge is organised around basic level categories (focus ontologies there for easy uptake?)

Dependent on the person who is thinking (scope needs more pimping)

No definitive basic level for a hierarchyA single mental image can reflect the

category

1 2 3 4

Topic Maps already supports

your crazy ideas

Topic Maps already supports

your crazy ideas

But we can only be subject-centric together

with others

But we can only be subject-centric together

with others

To be subject-centric … Community involvement and evolvement low (and

tricky to find and get into), and threshold of entry is very high

We’re a bit web shy, not part of the fabric of the web (no embedable XTM, [nearly] no exchange protocols after 10 years … we’re a bit slow on the ”cool” stuff), making experimentation through the worlds greatest network a bit slow

We’re silo farmers with a mechanism to break free, yet we haven’t embraced it much

To be subject-centric?? Categories are vocabulary, but where is the

vocabulary level in Topic Maps? How can we share ontologies - speak people’s languages - when they’re undefined as such? OWL is a good constraint to create knowledge.

Who could make persistent identifiers that people would trust?

Subject-centric, or context-centric? What are subjects without constraints or relationships?

BEKK CONSULTING ASSKUR 39, VIPPETANGEN. P.O. BOX 134 SENTRUM, 0102 OSLO, NORWAY.

WWW.BEKK.NO

Alexander JohannesenManager

+47 982 19 378Alexander.johannesen@bekk.no