[TopicMapsInLIS] 2nd.Topic Maps Conference and LIS

[Liliana Melgar E.]

Dear members of the list,

I am very happy after that wonderful meeting in Oslo where we could
see how our discipline is taking TM seriously, and implementing such
advanced and innovative ideas. It is a pleasure to see that the prize
went to one of them: the Victoria University of Wellington in New
Zealand. And also to see what Professor Oh is doing to lead the
adoption of TM in the international library community. I think that
Alexander Johannesen must be very happy to see his visions coming into
reality, slowly but strongly too.

For me, as a master student and librarian, it was a great oportunity
to start to put many pieces of the puzzle together. The most important
conclusion for me, and that gives me a lot of inspiration is that the
subject centric view brings us to think not any more in "cataloguing"
collections (in the sense of what belongs to a specific library), but
to "catalog" or organize the world of the subjects themselves. In some
sense that's what documentalist also have been doing (Otlet for
instance). We librarians have been centered in the level of
"manifestations" (as profesor Oh explains in the FRBR model), not in
the level of works and expressions, which is more the world of the
subjects in the vision of the TMs. And that's why, I think, the Web
was a protagonist (even more than the organizers expected), because is
there where the identity of things (the core of the subject centric
vision, the PSIs) can take place in a global scale.

I have now more questions and still some troubles trying to understand
the details on how the applications work (the role of XSLT, the way to
convert MARC with all the subfields, leaders, tags and complex
structures into the wonderful simplicity of TM), but the principles
are more clear now (I hope...), or at least the way to look at them
throught the eyes of the excellent people that belong to the TM
community and that went to the conference to share their ideas.

Thanks a lot!

regards,

-- 
Liliana Melgar