Lutz Maicher

Charting the Topic Maps Research and Applications Landscape

The papers in this volume were presented at the workshop Topic Map Research and Applications 2005 held on October 6-7, 2005, in Leipzig. TMRA 2005 was the first workshop of an annual series of international workshops dedicated to topic maps in research and industry. As the motto Charting the Topic Maps Research and Applications Landscape suggests, the aim of TMRA 2005 was to identify the primary open issues in research, learn about who is working on what, bring together researchers and application pioneers, stimulate the systematic tackling of such issues, and foster the exchange of ideas in a stimulating setting. Besides the scientific track, open-space sessions were foreseen as playgrounds for visionaries. A report from this look into future is added to this volume. TMRA 2005 was organised by the Zentrum fur Informations-, Wissens- und Dienstleistungsmanagement Leipzig to support exchange of experiences, results, and technology in the field of topic maps. The 24 papers (1 invited, 17 full papers, 5 work-in-progress reports, and 1 report on the open-space sessions) presented at TMRA 2005 and in the present volume were selected from more than 35 submissions. Every submission was carefully reviewed by three members of the Program Committee. Before publishing, the editors introduced an additional editorial loop after the workshop to ensure the highest quality and latest insights

Scaling Topic Maps

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Third International Conference on Topic Map Research and Applications, TMRA 2007, held in Leipzig, Germany in October 2007. The 16 revised full papers and 4 revised short papers presented together with 1 invited paper and 1 keynote lecture were carfully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on applied topic maps in industry and administration, visualisation and representation of topic maps, collaborative applications, standards related research, information integration with topic maps, social software with topic maps, topic maps engines, topic maps and dublin core, information management with topic maps, as well as open space and poster sessions.

Real-Time generation of topic maps from speech streams

Topic Maps are means for representing sophisticated, conceptual indexes of any information collection for the purpose of semantic information integration. To properly fulfil this purpose, the generation of Topic Maps has to base on a solid theory. This paper proposes the Observation Principle as the theoretical fundament of a future scientific discipline Topic Maps Engineering. SemanticTalk generates sophisticated, conceptual indexes of speech streams in real-time. Reflecting the Observation Principle, this paper describes how these indexes are created, how they are represented as Topic Maps and how they can be used for semantic information integration purposes.

Report from the Open Space and Poster Sessions

This is a summary of the presentations made in the poster session and the two open space sessions at the TMRA 2007 conference. The poster session consists of peer-reviewed conference submissions accepted as posters, while the open space sessions were free-form sessions where anyone could sign up to do a short presentation. The result is a collection of reports on works in progress and interesting ideas, some of which are likely to appear as papers at next years conference.

On How to Model Content Engineering in a Semantic Web Environment

The technologies of the Semantic Web demand complex publications which themselves are the result of complex production processes. The complexity of these publications is cause and effect of more sophisticated communication processes possible through the Semantic Web. We introduce a model which briefly describes these processes on a solution-independent level by using a market perspective. The model is based on the assumption of a market interaction between content offer and demand, but is independent of the existence of real content markets with financial transactions. We emphasise the need of structured guidelines for Semantic Web Content Engineering Processes. Furthermore, the model represents a foundation for their development.

Topic Maps in the eHumanities

Topic Maps is a semantic technology for the integration of heterogeneous data and the convenient deployment of domain specific and semantically enriched web portals. Topic Maps is already widely in productive usage in industry and administration. We demonstrate with six projects the current usage and the opportunities of Topic Maps in the eHumanities. The projects are CeDECA from University of Pavia, RAMLine from the London Royal Academy of Music, Pansori Retrieval System from the Sungkyunkwan University Seoul, Musica migrans from the University of Leipzig, Collection of the Finnish National Gallery, and Text and Semantic from Signum in Pisa.