Cooking for the Semantic Web - OWL and Topic Map Pudding

A recipe that can be found at http://www.mondeca.com/owl/owltm.htm

>From the introduction :

"... If ontologies are to become effectively the backbone technology for
mainstream Semantic Web application, Topic Maps cannot keep on pretending
they are agnostic about it, and play in a completely orthogonal field. On
the contrary, they should actually try and formalize their implicit
ontology, or certainly ontologies, for it might well turn out that no
consensus on a single ontology can be achieved, and that a formal
conceptualization effort will bring about several flavors of Topic Maps,
more or less constrained. In any case, for such a formalization, using OWL
should be considered as the natural approach.

This paper does not pretend to provide a complete formalization of Topic
Maps in OWL, but tries to grab in a pragmatic way some low-hanging fruits,
and cook some basic useful recipe with them. It addresses the TM concepts
that are the easiest to grab, and also the less controversial ones: topic,
association, role, occurrence, their respective classes, and constraints
that can bind them. The objectives seem quite limited, but actually cover a
large domain of practical frequent needs in Topic Maps authoring ..."

Many comments welcome, both from TM and OWL folks.

Bernard Vatant
Senior Consultant
Knowledge Engineering
Mondeca - www.mondeca.com
bernard.vatant@mondeca.com

Received on Friday, 1 August 2003 17:48:46 UTC