[TopicMapsInLIS] brief trip report, TMRA 2009 Leipzig

[C. M. Sperberg-McQueen]

Subscribers to this list may be interested in a brief report
from TMRA 2009, which took place last Thursday and Friday in
Leipzig.

On Wednesday, there were tutorials (Semantic mashups with
Wandora, Improving Microsoft Sharepoint with Topic Maps,
Hands-on TMQL, and Hands-on TMCL with Onotoa) and a one-day
code camp for people interested in working with the Ontopia
source code.  Thirty or so people attended the code camp.
Lars-Marius Garshol and Geir-Ove Grønmo, who ran it, had
looked at the list of registrants in enough detail to
realize, in the week before the meeting, that they would
not be able to assume that everyone attending had a good
grasp of Ontopia and its parts even from a user perspective,
still less from the perspective of a coder and bug-fixer.
So they began the day with a general overview of the system
and its parts, which was quite useful.  Towards the end of
the morning, they canvassed the attendees for particular
topics people wanted to discuss, and after lunch they addressed
those topics using slides they had gathered or created during
lunch.  The second half of the afternoon was devoted to
individual work.  Possibly some participants spent time
trying to diagnose one of the bugs marked 'suitable for
newbies' in the Google Code issues list
(http://code.google.com/p/ontopia/issues/list); me, I spent
it finally getting Ontopia's web interface to run on my
machine.  (It turns out that there IS documentation on how
to do that and how to get started with Ontopia after you
install it -- there just wasn't any documentation that told
me where to look for that getting-started document.  When
you check out the Ontopia source, there are instructions on
how to use the source to compile a fresh build.  Once you
do that, look INSIDE THE BUILD YOU JUST MADE for documentation,
NOT in the ./doc directory higher up in the source tree.  The
document you want is build/dists/ontopia-5.0.2/doc/install.html
[as long as the current build is 5.0.2].)  The build has a copy
of Tomcat all set up for use; all you have to do is launch it,
and point your browser at it, and you can use the various
Web-based tools running locally.)

Wednesday night, Lars-Marius and Geir-Ove and some others of
us went to a brew-pub where they wanted to check out the
seasonal beers.  (Both are serious beer tasters, and Geir-Ove
also brews as a hobby.)

On Thursday, we had first the opening keynote, in which I talked
mostly about the (to me, initially unexpected) relevance of
the classic AI hill-climbing problem to the challenge of
encouraging wide adoption of a technology.   The gist of my
argument is that if we regard the choice of computer technology
as an attempt to optimize the utility, or efficiency, or
whatever property of our hardware and software, then the choice
of information technology is an example of a hill-climbing
problem.  People change their choices in an attempt to make
things better for themselves.  The challenge, for those
interested in making Topic Maps or any other technology universal,
is (a) that most users use the very simplest, most primitive
algorithm known for the hill-climbing problem:  choose a
direction at random, and see if moving a small distance
in that direction moves you uphill; if so, do it and try again.
Never ever go downhill, even a little bit.  This works fine
when the surface of the optimization function is smooth and
has a single maximum, but it will get caught in a local maximum
whenever the surface is not smooth.  The refusal to go downhill
means, essentially, that no one wants to put up with any
temporary loss of functionality in the hopes that things will
get better later.  This means that any technology you want to
sell had better start showing a positive return on investment
very fast -- which means you can't require the user to learn
very much before they start seeing payback.  Also (b) even
a positive return on investment is not necessarily enough,
since many users regard every change in their computing environment
as very painful.  There has to be a LOT of good returns on the
effort of making any change, to make users feel they have come
out ahead.  Among the consequences of this state of affairs are
that even modest difficulties for new users can deter adoption
of a new technology.  (To cite just one example:  I'm a geek,
and I'm fairly self-reliant.  But after I downloaded Ontopia's
source code and compiled it, when I couldn't figure out what to
do next, my work with topic maps and Ontopia came to a complete
stand-still for about eight weeks.)  It's not always easy to
find a path for new adopters of a technology in which every new
investment of time, money, or effort brings new returns; actually,
it's very very hard.  I think that's one reason so few technologies
ever become ubiquitous.  All in all, it's enough to make me, for
one, tend to distrust plans that require universal adoption of
a technology in order to work.  In the case of XML, for example,
universal uptake was not an essential goal:  those involved
wanted something they could use themselves, and the project
would have counted as a success even if XML had never had the
wide adoption it got.

For most of the rest of the day, the conference was tracked.
I heard Lars Johnsen talk about his wish that Topic Maps might
play a role in national data standardization in Denmark (he
believes that some problems in the current state of things
would be avoided if topic maps were used).  Motomu Naito of
Kyoto University then talked about his work on constructing
authority files for names of members of the Japanese nobility
in the Meiji era, using topic maps.  The problems are severe,
and topic maps seem to provide a good foundation for solving
them.  Quintin Siebers of Morpheus Kenntnistechnologie BV talked
about work they are doing in a project called idSpace, for
distributed collaborative work in product innovation.  I got
dizzy from some of the buzzwords, and his demo turned out to
require more bandwidth than the meeting place was in a position
to provide (memo to meeting organizers of the world:  when you
have seventy-five information technologists in a building,
all wanting to use the network pretty much non-stop, sharing
a single DSL line among them really is not going to do the job).
Once he had finished, he sat next to me and reworked the demo,
so that during the break he was able to show those lingering
in the room that a text-only version of the demo worked.
The morning ended with Shu Matsuura of Tokyo Gakugei University
talking about a system he is building using topic maps for
cross-disciplinary e-learning.

After lunch, I attended a session on Query and Update.  Rani
Pinchuk of Space Applications Services presented work he and
colleagues have done in a question-answering system using topic
maps, specifically their work on determining the focus of a
question.  What is the user asking?  What kind of information
will count as an answer?  This can be hard even for humans; it's
not surprising that machines sometimes have trouble.  Lars-Marius
Garshol of Bouvet ASA then described some ideas for using topic
maps to improve searching, which he has experimented with in
an interface to his online collection of photos.  I believe I've
heard him talk about this before, at Balisage, but I think the
ideas are maturing.  Oddly enough, many systems for searching
topic maps seem to use full-text search on the topic map to
find things to show the user; they don't always even try to
exploit the structural information in the topic map.  As I
understand it, the approach Lars-Marius is experimenting
with first looks to see whether the search terms provided
by the user actually match any names of topics in the topic
map; if they do, then the system figures out how the things
named might be connected.  Given a search for "photos of
sam oh", for example, the system recognizes "photos"
as a topic type (in the sample application) and "sam oh" as
the name of a person.  Searching for things related to both
of these topics leads to photos (instances of the topic type)
depicting Sam Oh (an ISO WG member).  Presumably in a photo
collection with many photographers, it might also find
photos taken by Sam Oh.  Ideally, the interface could choose
one interpretation or the other, and let the user confirm the
choice or say "no, I meant the other interpretation".  Kal
Ahmed of Networked Planet talked about TMSPARQL, and Lars-Marius
talked about recent work adding an update facility to the
tolog language.  (Tolog is scheduled to go away in favor of
TMQL, eventually, but TMQL is still in flux, and in the
meantime tolog is there, he has an implementation, it works,
and he needed updates.)

My memories of the rest of the afternoon are a bit hazier; there
were some interesting talks about applications, and a nice
session of impromptu talks under the rubric "Open Space
session".  The talks were interesting, but I didn't take notes
and I can't now remember who talked about what.

Friday I mostly remember the poster session, with posters about
TMQL4J (a Java-based TMQL engine, which is trying to track the
revisions of the draft spec), TM-based e-learning environments,
the use of CouchDB and Javascript with topic maps, and one
on "Implementing TMQL for Teaching".  The poster session ended
early, so we all sneaked back into the other track to hear
Graham Moore of Networked Planet talk about their Web3 platform.
As always, he gave a dynamite presentation and persuaded me
that they have their act together and know what they are
doing, know what market they are trying to serve and what it
needs.  But the market they are aiming at is apparently far
enough away from me that I have trouble remembering any
details.

After lunch, another open-space session, and a presentation of
the entries in a Best Topic Map of 2009 contest sponsored by
Space Applications.  It was also many people's first glimpse
of Maiana, an online topic-map browser recently launched by the
Topic Maps Lab in Leipzig (http://maiana.topicmapslab.de/).
The audience voted Shu Matsuura's e-learning topic map this
year's winner.  I found the contest and the quick tour of the
topic maps surprisingly fun and found myself thinking about
what topic map I might be able to build in time to enter it in
next year's contest.  (Getting people to think along those lines
was, I assume, part of the point.)

Steve Newcomb gave a dynamite closing keynote, with a memorable
description of buying a circus tent with a ten-meter center
pole, and discovering that it came with no instructions (he
infers that most people who buy circus tents already know how
to put them up).  Putting up the circus tent turns out to
involve many people pulling on ropes in different directions --
sounds a bit like a tug-of-war -- and anyone who has spent much
time in standards committees will see a natural analogy with
standards work.  With luck, people pulling not just in
different directions but in opposite directions can manage
to get a tent to go up.  And looking around the conference,
with its mix of academic and commercial applications, and
its variety of papers, Steve felt able to say "The tent is
up, and the Topic Map circus has come to town."

Friday night a small group of us went to hear the motets in
the Thomaskirche at 6 o'clock (the choir of the Thomasschule
is deservedly famous), followed by a concert in the
Gewandhaus (Christopher Hogwood conducting Mozart and Richard
Strauss).  Both were very beautiful, and made a very satisfying
end to the week.

Anyone interested in topic maps will find TMRA well worth their
while.



-- 
****************************************************************
* C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies LLC
* http://www.blackmesatech.com
* http://cmsmcq.com/mib
* http://balisage.net
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