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communication
3/17/2004
10:44 AM
Communication from:
Ralph Hodgson and Robert Coyne
TopQuadrant Inc ( remarks are indicated by “[reply to TopQuadrant]”
)
Paul and everyone on the cc list,
You may be interested to see how some vendors are working on bringing Topic Maps and Semantic Web together by using OWL as a constraint language for Topic Maps:
http://www.idealliance.org/europe/04/call/xmlpapers/03-03-03.91/.03-03-03.html
We believe this to be a very positive development. It will allow people who have reasons to be in Topic Maps stay in Topic Maps and still be part of the Semantic Web.
It will also give Topic Maps capabilities they are
currently missing.
[reply to TopQuadrant(1)]
We, in TopQuadrant, see this choice (Topic Maps vs. RDF) as a matter of preference for an organization. We are committed to helping companies make sense of technology options and make decisions that are appropriate to their goals and existing infrastructure investments.
[reply to TopQuadrant(2)]
Topic Map has an intuitive meta model for talking about things. RDF is more generic which leads to it being less intuitive, nonetheless capable to represent all the distinctions in Topic Maps.
[reply to TopQuadrant(3)]
We believe that the key deciding factor for the adopters of semantic technology will be the availability of tools and their features. A few years ago Topic Map vendors were ahead of RDF tools.
Today there is much vendor activity and excitement around RDF and OWL. As always, the market drives what happens in the technology adoption, perhaps the reason for your e-mail.
[reply to TopQuadrant(4)]
If we were to look at this discussion only from the technology merit prospective, we would be describing Topic Maps as a computational engine.
We would be examining OWL as enabling language for many computational engines including Topic Maps. We would be describing ways of building computational models on top of OWL. We see some elements of this debate going on in a number of mailing lists including the one on topic maps.
[reply to TopQuadrant(5)]
Regards,
Irene Polikoff and Ralph Hodgson