Agile knowledge management or why I still choose Topic Maps
I was looking around and investigating different
technologies/products which can be used for knowledge management
recently...
Oracle just announced support of RDF in 10g Release
2. I really like the way RDF is implemented in Oracle database: clean and
elegant design, beautiful integration with traditional relational and XML
data.
This announcement made me think
again about RDF and Topic Maps. I was playing in my mind with idea of using RDF
for projects I am involved in...
First
interesting observation is about modeling dynamic worlds. In my domains objects
change names, properties, they move around, they create and delete
relationships. With Topic Maps I can create a type "TimeInterval" with
occurrences "DateStart", "DateEnd" and use instances of this type in scope of
occurrences and associations. Using TMQL I can easily create a projection of a
topic map for specific moment in time. With RDF... replace simple values with
objects which have DateStart, DateEnd properties?... hmmmm... use reification
for each time sensitive assertion?...
brrrr....
Scopes in Topic Maps allow to
represent context sensitive knowledge very nicely. And contexts are not limited
by time, of course. We can define and use any dimensions which are useful for
modeling.
Second observation is about
agile ontology development. I found myself refactoring ontologies for topic
maps in "production" again and again. Why Topic Maps in this case? Topic Maps
can work without schemas or additional ontology definitions such as "inverse"
or "symmetric" properties. Topic Maps basic semantic model is rich enough to
represent useful information. We can easily modify type hierarchies, add/delete
constraints without changing factual information. Topic Maps basic semantic
model combined with TMCL - pattern-based Topic Maps Constraint Language,
supports this agile ontology development style better than heavy OWL, from my
perspective.
Posted: Sat
- October 1, 2005 at 01:18 PM