Category Archives: Techquila

TM4J 0.9.6 Released

Posted on by

Today sees the release of the latest version of TM4J, the open-source topic map engine. This release is primarily a bug-fix release, but also enhances the tolog query implementation to enable dynamic association predicates to use a variable for the association type, thus allowing queries such as: $ASSOC(foo, bar) to find the type of all associations between topics foo and bar.
Source and binary distributions can be downloaded from the TM4J SourceForge page.

Topic Mapping Pepys’ Diary

Posted on by

Here’s an idea that just struck me on the train on the way home.
Phil Gyford runs an excellent blog of the diary of Samuel Pepys. He blogs entries from the diaries one at a time 343 years to the day from the date of the diary entry (so at the time of writing we are in July 1661).
My idea is to attempt to topic map the entries in parallel with Phil’s blogging.
The diary has a lot of interesting features:

  • References to places, some of which still exist, some which have since been redeveloped.
  • A large cast of characters with family and social relationships.
  • Reference to events of both major and minor significance.

Topic maps excel at enabling references between these features to be made and connections not at first apparent by a serial reading of the entries might be revealed. As far as I know there have not been many attempts to topic map a series of events like this so it would be an interesting experiment. I wrote some thoughts on topic mapping events a few weeks ago, so it might also be an interesting way to put that to the test.
So here’s the plan:
I’m going to start blogging topic-mapped entries from Pepy’s diary. In each blog entry I’ll reference the entry, write some explanation about why I’m modelling it in my topic map in the way that I am and then include the topic map for that entry. Initially I plan to use LTM notation as it is more compact and readable than XTM.
It would be nice to make this an interactive process, so I welcome comments and proposals of alternate representations! Also, as I am no Pepys scholar, all I can do is attempt to represent what I read in the entry – I would welcome pointers in the right direction from anyone with more knowledge of this subject.
Seeing as at present there is a hiatus in the diary (there are no entries from 8th to 13th July), I’m going to attempt a bit of catch up from 1st July 1661. Watch this space…

TMTab 0.5.0 Released

Posted on by

TMTab is a plugin for the Protege ontology editor that enables the creation of topic maps (in XTM syntax).
TMTab version 0.5.0 is a straight-forward port of TMTab to the latest version (2.1 beta) of Protege.
TMTab is released as charity-ware. If you find it useful please consider making a donation to Shelter – the Help / About Plugins… menu option has more details (select TMTab from the list of plugins you have installed!).
For more information and to download the software, click here.

TMAPI 1.0 Alpha closing soon…

Posted on by

TMAPI is a community project I started to try to build a common Java API to topic map processing engines. The idea is to try and create something like a DOM for topic maps.
The alpha cycle for the 1.0 release comes to a close on Friday – all comments received before Friday will be taken into consideration for the TMAPI 1.0 beta release which we hope to get out within a few days of the close of the alpha cycle.
TMAPI has a SourceForge project page. We track comments and discussions in the Bug tracker; discuss and vote on the mailing list and you can grab the Java code for the interfaces from CVS, or alternatively browse the Javadoc online.

Continue reading →