Wrap-up of TMRA 2009

Leipzig - The Fifth international conference on Topic Maps Research and Applications TMRA 2009 took place from November 11th to 13th, 2009 in Leipzig.

Nexxor had sent three participants, who – just back from Leipzig – decided, to publish a wrap-up of the conference with some personal impressions.

Code Camp and Tutorials

On Wednesday the actual conference was preceded by a day of tutorials and the so-called ontopia code camp. The latter, managed by Lars Marius Garshol and Geir Ove Grønmo, drew close to 30 participants, and thus showed the importance of bouvet's decision to open source the ontopia knowledge suite. In his wrap-up on Friday, Lars Marius reported that further improving documentation ranked highest among the open issues.

The code camp was competing for participants with two parallel tracks of tutorials: Hands on TMQL by Sven Krosse, Semantic Mashups with Wandora by Aki Kivela, Hands on TMQL with Onotoa by Hannes Niederhausen, and Improving Microsoft SharePoint with Topic Maps by Graham Moore and Axel Borge.

Wandora is an open source desktop application to build and manage topic maps, which is very easy to set up. It follows a pragmatic approach rather than the intention to support the full Topic Maps standard. Its clever layering model is particularly valuable for the authoring process of topic maps making use of the merge or include directives. Due to its large number of mappers, Wandora certainly qualifies as a useful tool for semantic mashups.

As the tutorial on onotoa showed, a visual topic map schema editor comes in very handily for creating TMCL constraints. For the expert a comfortable text editor might be a more efficient approach to author constraints. However, the graphical editor lowers the pain for newbies considerably, and is useful for providing quick visual overviews for schemas.

Conference

After Lutz Maicher's opening address of the conference on Thursday, Graham Moore and Khal Ahmed talked on behalf of UK-based Networked Planet, one of the platinum sponsors of the conference. Starting from the conference motto Linked Topic Maps Khal referred to the Open Data initiative, and postulated that information wanted to be free. He topped that up by saying: 'Not only does it want to be free, information also wants to be a topic map.' Khal sees the market moving away from relational databases towards schema free data, and the languages that use it. His assessments did not seem to cause much disagreement in the audience.

The following opening keynote was given by Michael Sperberg-McQueen, co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification, who shared his thoughts about how to lead ground-breaking technologies to market adoption. He also related the conference motto to Linked Data which he sees as a marketing shift in what used to be called the Semantic Web. By lowering expectations this shift should increase the probability that people are happy with the result. Michael compared marketing to the hill climbing problem. He explained that customers want to move only uphill, and are generally reluctant to move at all due to the high cost of moving even a little bit. Not seeing the whole landscape and risking to climb just a local hill, makes customers even more reluctant to move. Eliminating obstacles by improved usability, ease of installation, quick ROI, scalability and simplicity are among the aspects Michael rated as critical for success. He also mentioned that religious commitment as a requirement for adoption, was a bit of a problem in the case of the Semantic Web, and voiced his impression that this might be of relevance for Topic Maps too.

After the coffee break the parallel track sessions started, offering more than 30 contributions in the sessions entitled Ontology Modeling, Applications, Information Logistics, Authoring and Navigation, Linked Topic Maps, and Infrastructure.

The two open space sessions with their five minute contributions and their famously strict chair Lars Marius Garshol were very well received. Among about 20 contributions Benjamin Bock's presentation on the last update statements of three important web domains dealing with Topic Maps might very well have been the most important one. According to Benjamin's analysis the sites draw 40 new unique visitors each day - visitors interested in Topic Maps and confronted with outdated content. He announced that the Topic Maps Lab will tackle this problem in due course.

Friday afternoon saw the Best Topic Map Contest, which has been held for the first time. On behalf of SpaceApplication Services - the initiator and sponsor of the contest - Rani Pinchuk stated that it was high time to increase the number of openly available high quality topic maps. He reported that most introductions to Topic Maps still depend on Steve Pepper's Opera Map. While the usefulness and quality of this map is proven, Rani sees the need to supplement it by other maps addressing a variety of fields. The presentation of the eight submitted topic maps was followed by a first round of voting by the conference participants, for which a rather innovative imaging approach for vote counting was employed. After the coffee break it took a second vote on the two top ranked maps authored by Robert Cerny and Shu Matsuura to determine the winner. The Best Topic Map Contest was won by Shu Matsuura's map on Everyday Physics.

In his closing keynote, Steve Newcomb, one of the fathers of Topic Maps, looked back on the standardization process, and emphasized the need for different and at times conflicting views in such multi-party endeavours. He employed the metaphor of manual erection of a large tent, requiring the members of the set-up team to each pull in different directions and to do so with all strength they can possibly muster. The audience seemed to be well aware that some of its members share personal memories with the speaker as for the pulling on opposite sides of the center pole. However, in Steve's view, the Topic Maps tent is up, the Topic Maps circus has finally come to town, and the Topic Maps flag is waving on top. He sees the distinction between identity and roles as a deeply human concept, making up one of the strengths of what he calls the Topic Maps brand. A brand providing a way to represent and align different ways people think. Steve referred to the metaphor of six blind men touching an elephant for explaining, that understanding arises from integrating different views. With the open sourced OKS, growing Microsoft support of Topic Maps, and the activities of the Topic Maps Lab as three strong legs around the center pole of the Topic Maps standards, the future for the Topic Maps circus looks bright.

Some Statistics

The number of companies present at the conference showed the growing commercial interest in Topic Maps. This time, more companies than research institutions were present. A total of 19 different companies had sent participants to the TMRA. With six participants, Ravn Webveveriet AS, a leading Norwegian e-learning company, sent the largest delegation and thus made a strong point for the importance of Topic Maps in their solutions.

With 14 non-commercial organizations participating, one might conclude that most participants had a commercial affiliation. But far from it, most participants were from academic or educational institutions. The tilting of the balance to the non-commercial side was largely due to over 20 participants affiliated to the Topic Maps Lab.

Wrap-up

The TMRA conference is an event no one interested in Topic Maps should miss. It provides an international forum with an inspiring atmosphere for the exchange of ideas and new developments. Its increased importance for the community was underlined by Steve Pepper’s announcement, that from now on TMRA would lead the way by setting the conference motto which will be picked up by the more user oriented annual Topic Maps conferences in Oslo.