An Interactive Ontology for the Itertidal Fish of the Cape

This paper describes the design and implementation of an interactive identification guide for the intertidal fish of the Cape. Its aim is to create an interactive navigational system to improve the process of identifying fish species based on their feature. This system uses Topic Map as data structure to represent ontology information. It is separated into three parts: knowledge representation, Topic Map query language and Visualization

Scalability of Topic Map Systems

The purpose of this thesis was to find approaches solving major performance and scalability issues for Topic Maps-related data access and the merging process. Especially regarding the management of multiple, heterogeneous topic maps with different sizes and structures. Hence the scope of the research was mainly focused on the Maiana web application with its underlying MaJorToM and TMQL4J back-end

Topic maps for custom viewing of data

A Topic Map is a structured network of hyperlinks that points into an information pool. Topic Maps have an existence independent of the information pool and hence different Topic Maps can form different layers above the same information pool and provide us with different views of it. We explore the use of Topic Maps with the Unified Column Descriptor (UCD) scheme developed in the frame of the ESO-CDS data mining project. UCD, with its multi-tier hierarchical structure, categorizes parameters reported in tables and catalogs. By using Topic Maps we show how columns from different catalogs with similar but not identical descriptions could be combined. A direct application for the Virtual Observatory community is that of merging catalogs in order to generate customized views of data.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures. LaTeX, uses spie.sty (included). To appear in Proc. SPIE v. 4846 (2002). More details at http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~aam/science/topicmap

Navigare fra archivi, biblioteche e musei : le mappe topiche come strumento di armonizzazione

Thesis about how to use topic maps in cultural heritage area. Introduction about genesis of topic maps and about projects based on topic maps. How to use topic maps in archives. Topic maps for authority control. Topic maps to harmonize cultural heritage of different areas. Using data mining in library to improve users' researches. Bibliography about topic maps. Supervisor of the thesis is Prof. Paul Gabriele Weston; co-examiner is Dr. Fabio Ciotti. Please feel free to use, copy, modify and redistribute this resource in agreement with Creative Commons BY SA license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5

Navigare fra archivi, biblioteche e musei : le mappe topiche come strumento di armonizzazione

Thesis about how to use topic maps in cultural heritage area. Introduction about genesis of topic maps and about projects based on topic maps. How to use topic maps in archives. Topic maps for authority control. Topic maps to harmonize cultural heritage of different areas. Using data mining in library to improve users' researches. Bibliography about topic maps. Supervisor of the thesis is Prof. Paul Gabriele Weston; co-examiner is Dr. Fabio Ciotti. Please feel free to use, copy, modify and redistribute this resource in agreement with Creative Commons BY SA license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5

Comparing topic maps constraint specification languages

Topic Map Constraint Language (TMCL) provides a means to express constraints on topic maps conforming to ISO/IEC 13250. In this article, we will use a test suite and show, step-by-step, the way we handled several kinds of Topic Maps constraints in many different instances in order to answer questions like: Do they do the same job? Are there some kinds of Topic Maps constraints that are easier to specify with one of them? Do you need different background to use the tools? Is it possible to use them in similar situations (the same topic maps instances)? May we use them to produce an equal result? How do AsTMa!, OSL, Toma, and XTche relate to Topic Maps Constraint Language (TMCL)? What kind of constraints each one of these three can not specify? We will conclude this paper with a summary of the comparisons accomplished between those Topic Maps constraint languages over the use case proposed

Topic maps constraint languages : understanding and comparing

Topic map constraint language (TMCL) provides a means to express constraints on topic maps conforming to ISO/IEC 13250. In this article, we will use a test suite and show, step-by-step, the way we handled several kinds of topic maps constraints in many different instances in order to answer questions like: Do they do the same job? Are there some kinds of topic maps constraints that are easier to specify with one of them? Do you need different background to use the tools? Is it possible to use them in similar situations (the same topic maps instances)? May we use them to produce an equal result? How do AsTMa!, OSL, Toma and XTche relate to TMCL? What kind of constraints each one of these three cannot specify? We will conclude this paper with a summary of the comparisons accomplished between those topic maps constraint languages over the use case proposed.(undefined

Topic Maps: Aplicación al modelado de tesauros

Trabajo de investigación 2º curso de Doctorado en Documentación. Curso 2003/2004El presente trabajo es un análisis del modelo Topic Maps con el objetivo de su aplicación al modelado de tesauros. Al no ser muchas las herramientas de autor desarrolladas y disponibles hasta el momento (al menos que no requieran conocimientos profundos de lenguajes de programación) la aplicación práctica final ha quedado limitada por estas circunstancias. En la primera parte se presenta el desarrollo histórico del modelo y su situación de desarrollo presente, pasando después, en la segunda parte a analizar los conceptos que lo componen y su sintaxis. Por último, se explica como se ha llevado a cabo el modelado de un “minitesauro” utilizando esta norma

Metadata-based and personalized web querying

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The advent of the Web has raised new searching and querying problems. Keyword matching based querying techniques that have been widely used by search engines, return thousands of Web documents for a single query, and most of these documents are generally unrelated to the users’ information needs. Towards the goal of improving the information search needs of Web users, a recent promising approach is to index the Web by using metadata and annotations. In this thesis, we model and query Web-based information resources using metadata for improved Web searching capabilities. Employing metadata for querying the Web increases the precision of the query outputs by returning semantically more meaningful results. Our Web data model, named “Web information space model”, consists of Web-based information resources (HTML/XML documents on the Web), expert advice repositories (domain-expert-specified metadata for information resources), and personalized information about users (captured as user profiles that indicate users’ preferences about experts as well as users’ knowledge about topics). Expert advice is specified using topics and relationships among topics (i.e., metalinks), along the lines of recently proposed topic maps standard. Topics and metalinks constitute metadata that describe the contents of the underlying Web information resources. Experts assign scores to topics, metalinks, and information resources to represent the “importance” of them. User profiles store users’ preferences and navigational history information about the information resources that the user visits. User preferences, knowledge level on topics, and history information are used for personalizing the Web search, and improving the precision of the results returned to the user. We store expert advices and user profiles in an object relational database iv v management system, and extend the SQL for efficient querying of Web-based information resources through the Web information space model. SQL extensions include the clauses for propagating input importance scores to output tuples, the clause that specifies query stopping condition, and new operators (i.e., text similarity based selection, text similarity based join, and topic closure). Importance score propagation and query stopping condition allow ranking of query outputs, and limiting the output size. Text similarity based operators and topic closure operator support sophisticated querying facilities. We develop a new algebra called Sideway Value generating Algebra (SVA) to process these SQL extensions. We also propose evaluation algorithms for the text similarity based SVA directional join operator, and report experimental results on the performance of the operator. We demonstrate experimentally the effectiveness of metadata-based personalized Web search through SQL extensions over the Web information space model against keyword matching based Web search techniques.Özel, Selma AyşePh.D