Re: SUO: RE: Topic Maps
>Chris,
>As the ontologists around here are fond of saying, "I believe we are on the
>same page."
>I put together the beginnings of a little paper on mapping IBIS to XTM. It's
>at http://www.thinkalong.com/JP/ibisXTM.pdf
>My reason for doing so was to support my chapter in the book I am editing
>_XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web_ to be published
>by Addison Wesley this year, and for my paper at KT 2001, "Bringing
>Knowledge Technologies to the Classroom", a draft of which can be seen at
>http://www.thinkalong.com/JP/ParkKT2001.pdf
Jack, thanks for that reference. However you say some things there
that I think are wrong, or seriously misleading in the SUO context.
First, you identify Concept Maps (reference Joe Novak) with semantic
networks; and elsewhere in the document you claim that concept maps
are a notation for knowledge representation. Neither of these is
really correct, at least with the sense of 'semantic network' and
'knowledge representation' used in the AI tradition. Novakian Cmaps
are widely used in classsroom applications and are apparently of
considerable use in aiding inter-personal collaboration (other folk
in this Institute have been developing Cmap interactive educational
software for years, with Novak as an external consultant; you can
download it free from http://cmap.coginst.uwf.edu/ ) but they are
most definitely not a KR formalism. They have no clear semantics, or
indeed even a clear logical syntax.
I am currently working on a Darpa-funded effort to build software to
allow 'subject-matter experts' (read: people who don't know logic) to
input Cmaps which will get translated into a suitable KR formalism,
and it is currently unclear whether this will turn out to be easier
than translating natural language into KR or more difficult:
certainly it is a research problem at about the same scale of
difficulty. So if Topic Maps are concept maps, they certainly are not
KR or semantic networks (or CG's) as understood in the present
context.
Pat Hayes
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