Comments for Techquila Tech

Comment on Sample Topic Maps by kal

kal — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:35:23 +0000

Hi Marcus, Thanks for getting in touch! You are right, Techquila is not active any more as a business. My time is spent working in my new company NetworkedPlanet. Our Web3 product is a full topic maps engine with a nice schema editor interface and a user-friendly, ontology-driven topic map editor. It can also be used to publish your data as RDF Linked Data with support for SPARQL queries, so it is really a full system for creating and publishing linked data. I'm also working on BrightstarDB, which is a NoSQL database for .NET that just happens to be built on an RDF triple store. It doesn't have all the nice GUI of Web3, but it has a lot of neat features for developers so you might want to check it out. Both products have a free download (Web3 has a limited trial period; BrightstarDB is free to use for internal development purposes and open-source projects), so if you want to check either of them out I encourage you to do so!

Comment on Sample Topic Maps by Marcus Vinícius Chevitarese Alves

Marcus Vinícius Chevitarese Alves — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:01:09 +0000

Hi, Kal Ahmed.
I’m a system analyst at Brazilian House of Representatives and I’m very interested about using ‘topic maps’. We’ve a lot of information that we need to organize and to show to the citizen in a readable way, besides this information also needs to be machine-readable.
Seems to me that the website ‘techquila.com’ is not active. Is it true? Are you working in another site? May you suggest another websites like ‘techquila.com’?
Thanks in advance.

Comment on Measuring The Semantic Web – Measurement Units by Robert Barta

Robert Barta — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:52:41 +0000

> Without a declarative approach to units you are forced to hardcode ….

Sure, but that has already been done in code. So my question is: “What is the benefit of having a declarative description of the relationship between units?”

So is there some kind of reasoning?

And even if so: I would rather want to see “units” as part of any knowledge model.

Comment on Measuring The Semantic Web – Measurement Units by Kal

Kal — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:36:36 +0000

@Robert: Without a declarative approach to units you are forced to hardcode all possible conversion factors and your application has no discovery mechanism for reasoning about units that have not been hardcoded into the application. I don’t think this is a scalable/sustainable solution for LOD. UCUM codifies in prose the sort of things that I think should be codified in a machine-processable manner – unit definitions and conversion factors.

Comment on Measuring The Semantic Web – Measurement Units by Robert Barta

Robert Barta — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:39:50 +0000

Since units are such an intrinsic part of physics, I actually do not think it necessary to have a fully declarative description of units and their meaning.

Personally, I have been quite happy with UCUM:

http://aurora.regenstrief.org/~ucum/ucum.html

For the inclusion into Topic Maps, I have simply “evolved” the model to include units into it, and also the notation, and of course the query language.

A “native” solution. It was fast and easy to do.

Comment on Measuring Out The Semantic Web – Definitions by Tweets that mention Techquila Shots » Measuring Out The Semantic Web – Definitions -- Topsy.com

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:24:41 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kal Ahmed, innovimax. innovimax said: Revival! RT @kal_ahmed More on measuring with #HyTime http://bit.ly/6MA0GT .. will post thoughts on other measurement ontologies #sc34 #sgml [...]

Comment on Measuring Out The Semantic Web – Definitions by Robert Barta

Robert Barta — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:17:52 +0000

I can see now how the datacube concept has influenced HyTime. The formal definition is pretty similar.

Comment on Measuring Out The Semantic Web by Kal

Kal — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:57:51 +0000

@Lars Marius:

The next post will look at what I think HyTime has got. Then hopefully the one after that will look at how we could make use of what HyTime has got in a Topic Map. I actually think that scope for assignment might be the easiest way to make this work, but doing something with decorating the occurrence type in the ontology to define a default measurement unit for a specific occurrence type might be an interesting way forwards.

@Bob:

QUDT looks like exactly the kind of thing I am thinking about. Probably the only place I would have a quibble (and it is a minor one) is the use of decimal values to express the conversion factors rather than expressing conversion as a ratio of whole numbers. Maybe I don’t have to carry on wading through HyTime

@Patrick and Steve

The charter for the OASIS TC looks very promising. Of course, it says nothing about Topic Maps, so perhaps the way forward for this blog is to think about what Lars Marius calls “attachment” (good term) of units to measurements expressed in a topic map. However, I’ve got far enough down the road of reading the right bits of HyTime that I might as well also write up my own findings as well…stay tuned

Plenty to mull over…

Comment on Measuring Out The Semantic Web by Steve Ray

Steve Ray — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:46:40 +0000

You might be interested to know that the ontology community is just now organizing itself to synthesize a “Units of Measure” ontology as an OASIS standard, using the various existing measurement ontologies. See http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UoM_Ontology_Standard. Having said that, we ought to discuss Hytime – I’ll bring your blog article to the group’s attention.

Cheers,

- Steve

Comment on Measuring Out The Semantic Web by Twitted by semanticnews

Twitted by semanticnews — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 08:55:22 +0000

[...] This post was Twitted by semanticnews [...]