Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Some ideas on why many people hit a wall when trying to learn topicmaps.

Topicmaps are a powerful standard for managing ontology-like metadata. It’s kinda hard to get your head around topicmaps, but this is not because they are especially complex or hard to grasp (Not harder than object orientation, relational databases or XML for example). They’re really not that bad. It’s because of the lack of easy to understand real world applications that you could hack together in order to learn topicmaps data structures and concepts.

When you learn about databases, you’ll start by programming a simple script to organize your CD’s or something.

Manage your contacts, organize your income - there are thousands of beginners tutorials like this for almost any programming language available. After you’ve wrapped your head around the basic concepts (relations and ID’s), you can then learn about more advanced ideas like normalization or joins.

If you had to read about the conceptual underpinnings of databases in order to get your head around them, they would never have taken off the way they did.

There are no hackable applications that I know of you can use to learn topicmaps. This means that there are no beginners tutorials that let you hack a useful application together based on topicmaps. All the tutorials I’ve seen teach you topicmap concepts and how to create a topicmap. They don’t help you create an application to organize your CD’s.

In a recent post to the topicmaps list, I asked to come up with something that was easily hackable, useful and would help people understand topicmaps. There were some ideas, but we couldn’t come up with an acceptable example. (This is not to say that it can’t be done. We should think about what exactly is missing here.)

So when you’re interested in topicmaps, you read the specs or one of these tutorials, and unless you’re familiar with data models and a bunch of advanced metadata concepts (reification anyone?), it’s gonna blow your head. Many people give up right there.

The distance between the topicmap model and a real life application seems larger than the distance between the relational database model and a real life application.

Similarly:

Topicmap tools are at the topicmap level, not at the real-life usefulness level. In other words, topicmap tools let you manage, create, and merge topicmaps. But they don’t let you do anything specifically useful outside of the topicmap realm (like create a simple application for managing your CD’s, like Access lets you do).

The level of abstraction of topicmaps is higher (which provides great Power and Flexibility) than that of databases. But that means that, to get from a topicmap to a useful application, you need more stuff in between. RDF seems to be resolving this problem: the stuff in between are useful standards like FOAF. Topicmaps need standards like that, that let you do something useful with topicmaps, and thus make the tools useful and topicmaps understandable.

Shirky at his best describes patterns that seem to fly against common sense. Situated Software: “The curious thing to me about Teachers on the Run was that it worked where the Web School version failed. RateMyProfessors.com has been available for years, with a feature set that put the simplistic write/read/vote capabilities of Teachers on the Run to shame. Yet no one at ITP had ever bothered to use RateMyProfessors.com, though the weekend’s orgy of rating and voting demonstrated untapped demand.”

Jon Udell on Macromedia Flex: a developers environment for developing applications in Flash. Competing with XUL (open source) and XAML (microsoft).

So Apple is patenting a hierarchical menu on the iPod? United States Patent Application: 0040055446: In a portable multimedia device, a method, apparatus, and system for providing user supplied configuration data are described.”

Someone seems to have messed up, the link to the American express Seinfeld/Superman ad shown on TV doesn’t work: HTTP 404 Not Found. (It’s fixed now)

An answer in reply to my recent XML question. More examples would be good, I’m trying to understand this…

Mena’s Corner: “Nine days ago was the one year anniversary of our incorporation of Six Apart (prior to that we were a LLC). In this last year, we went from two people working out of our apartment to a company of twenty-four including a Japanese subsidiary (announcement) and a team in Europe working as our exclusive agent.
[...]
When we knew that Movable Type Pro had to be postponed because the direction of the product hadn’t been clearly outlined in terms of development resources, we should have told our users.”

Six Apart, eating their own dogfood, started blogging from within their own corporation.

Andrew points to A new kind of comments spam?.

Looking at this a bit more, it is clearly spam. Someone is creating a circle of fake “personal” websites using cookie cutter text (the ‘about me’ is the same for all the sites), various free hosts and varying images. Warning: the sites pop up ads of the most annoying kind.

It really wouldn’t take a hacker much work to create thousands of fake “personal” websites that are a lot better and varied than this one, and then comment spam the hell out of the weblog world to build pagerank. I don’t want to give anyone ideas but I’m pretty sure this is inevitable.

I’ve been wondering about XML and highlighting text. If I have some text, and I highlight a piece and tag it with some subject, I can easily express that in XML.

But what if then I highlight another, partly overlapping part of the sentence and want to tag that with another tag? How am I supposed to identify that with XML? I don’t want to do what HTML does with overlapping Italics Bold tags, because I want to remember what I highlighted as 1 section, not cut it up in different sections that are tagged the same way. (Is this making sense).

So what is the solution to this? Is there any? I think the fundamental problem is that, at a data modeling level, XML lets you build trees very easily, but not laticces (overlapping structures).

Help.

Annotated Aggregator client HTTP tests: UI standards to complement Aggregator HTTP standards.

Does something like CleverCactus exist for Windows? (invitation-only p2p)

I didn’t catch the second part of this conversation - sometimes you just want out. Every day, I take the train to work. There are conductors who check your ticket, and there is a train driver in the driver’s seat. I got on today, and passed by a kid being trained as driver. The angry teacher was puffing: “I will only tell you this once!”

RAP - RDF API for PHP. Now who does an XTM API for PHP? Call it XAP :)

I started rewriting the EasyTopicMaps wiki, starting with WhatAreTopicmaps.

Lost Boy: Scattered Self: “Let’s synthesise the above rambling into a series of recommendations for building user-centric services:”

Read this if you’re building web tools/services.

Structured Procrastination: “I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time.”

A wiki that let’s you do faceted browsing! Very cool.

XhtmlInterWikiMarkupStandard - InterWiki: “After some discussion on interwiki-discuss, we may as well start collecting ideas for a possible XHTML InterWiki markup standard.”

AIfIA - Español published a whole new set of translations and some original articles in Spanish. Thanks to Javier Velasco, Jorge Vergara, Fernando Siles, Malisa Gutierrez, and Jorge Arango.

Via Simon, The Passivator (Ftrain.com). It highlights passive verbs and adverbs, calling your attention to them and helping you improve your writing. (passive verbs and adverbs make often not the best writing).

We’re getting at a point where it becomes too much work (really) to follow all the going ons with the semantic web and such.

Deep Web Research: A Subject Tracer Information Blog.

I reinstated the EasyTopicMaps wiki. I ported all content. The formatting needs some work.

WebChoir Products - TermChoir: “It is a completely web-based editorial support system for managing and maintaining controlled vocabularies, classifications and thesauri, whether imported or created in-house.”

Anyone used this?

Simon Willison’s Blogroll says I updated my blog “-1 years, 12 months ago”. Is that 2 years into the future? And if so, would my recent fooling around with futureme.org have something to do with that?

VoteLinks - Technorati Developers Site: “Indexing and tracking applications treat all links as endorsements, or expressions of support. This is a problem, as we need to link to those we disagree with as well, to discuss why.”

Peter Bowyer’s weblog: Template engines:- PHP’s biggest joke: “PHP needs a recommended template system.” It sure does.

Hey, Amazon now lets you look inside my book :)

A Brief Introduction to the Goals of Frassle: trust based taxonomy aggregation?

I like Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto. I think a huge problem with large companies is that their core values are distorted. People who work there then make decisions reflecting those core values (provide vallue to shareholders, for example).

If I ever start a company, my 4 rules for the company will be something like: (inspired by Asimov’s robot rules)

Rule 1. Don’t be evil.

Rule 2. Make a positive difference in the world, unless it means violating rule 1.

Rule 3. Survive and grow as a company, unless it means violating rule 1 or 2.

Rule 4. Treat employees well, unless it means violating rule 1, 2 or 3.

These rules say: If you can make a positive difference by being evil, don’t do it. If treating employees well endangers survival of the company, and you’re making a positive difference and not being evil, don’t treat them so well. If you can survive as a company and you’re not being evil, but you’re not making a positive difference in the world, don’t bother. Find something else to do.

F u t u r e M e . o r g: “Dear FutureMe,
You better not be in Ireland. If you are hit yourself in the face and book a flight. For fucks sake don’t waste anytime. Go anywhere, get lost, what are you waiting for?”

At least someone likes Brussels. My friends say it’s a city that grows on you.

What’s a good place to start if I’d like to do some DIY projects connecting stuff to a computer. Like, having a lightbulb light up when an email arrives. The basics (I am bad at electronics, duct tape is my friend!). I can’t seem to find a good place to start with this stuff.

A Cheap, Elegant, Digital Picture Frame: “Digital Frames hang on the wall and pace through pictures and videos. They are a great idea. Unfortunately, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of digital frame technology to date, it is disappointing. This led me to make a small project of a digital frame that costs less than two dollars.”

Michael points to: Reuters Corpus: “As a service to the research community Reuters is making available large quantities of Reuters News stories for use in research and development of natural-language-processing, information-retrieval or machine learning systems.”

Jon Udell: “It reinforces my hunch that the combination of easy-to-create blogs and easy-to-create narrated screen videos could put users in charge of software marketing, education, and training.”

Bloug Entry (Mar 23, 2004): “Can you simply translate an information architecture?” An excellent entry breaking new grounds on international IA.

Lars Marius Garshol: Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! Lars knows what he’s talking about.

How to Save the World

matt jones | work & thoughts | Two cheers for Technorati’s redesign: “But what we also found in our testing (done by the wonderful Flow Interactive…) was that if the search box was in that ’sweet spot’ but was, for want of a better phrase, ‘too integrated to the page’ i.e. boxed in, or sounded by other design elements - the banner blindness kicked in again.”

I’m jealous. Good writing.