Tutorials@TMRA provides a full day (October 10) of applied knowledge from the Topic Mapping Space. We invite you to participate in the practical tutorials. The schedule of tutorials@TMRA 2007 is provided by following this link.
Abstract: Designing the ontology is an integral and important aspect of every Topic Maps application. It might sound
difficult, but in fact it's not. Learn exactly what an ontology is and how to go about developing one. This
day takes the form of an interactive workshop that provides an overview of all the issues to be considered
when modeling topic maps. Practical examples are used to apply the methodologies and to help you make
modeling decisions based on your requirements. By the conclusion of the tutorial, each participant will
have had the opportunity to contribute to the design of a realistic ontology using the methods and principles
presented during the workshop.
Audience: This tutorial is suitable for all levels. It is particularly well suited for information architects, CIOs, project
managers, system designers and system developers.
Morning Session
Instructor: Benjamin Bock (University of Leipzig, D) Ruby Topic Maps (half day) Abstract: Ruby Topic Maps (RTM) is a Topic Maps engine created in
and for the Ruby programming language. Its focus is an intuitive, easy to
use interface, or, as the creators of Ruby would express it: RTM aims to
be the Topic Map programmers best friend. This tutorial promotes Ruby
and RTM to Topic Map programmers, especially Java programmers who
used TMAPI before. This is the first presentation of RTM, so it will start
at the very beginnings. Going on with the usage of the library, it will
highlight major differences to other major programming languages and
also to other TM engines.
Audience: The participants should not be completely new to Topic Maps or programming in general. However, no Ruby skills nor knowledge of other Topic Maps engines are
required. The target audience has preferably a technical background as the topic
is a programming library. The hands-on part can be individualized to address
both, beginners and professional programmers.
Technology Requirements: For a hands-on experience, we recommend
at least one computer per 2 participants. Personal laptops of the participants
are preferred. Ideally with Ruby already installed, any major operating system is
fine.
Instructor: Robert Barta TMQL - the upcoming Topic Maps query language (half day) Abstract: Writing a Semantic Web application quickly exposes the need to use a
proper query language to effectively access semantic content inside a
Topic Map store. This tutorial will first introduce the more
conventional language features and will demonstrate how applications
can benefit from TMQL in general. It will then cover more advanced
topics such as atomification, topic addressing, variables and
bindings, association predicates before it turns to content generation
of tables, XML and maps. The last part will show how TMQL fits into
the TM standards landscape and how the semantics is defined. Potential
implementors also can get an opportunity to be walked through existing
code of a prototype implementation.
Audience: The main emphasis will be on the language features themselves, so the
tutorial is mainly addressed towards application developers. Still,
TMQL may play a certain architectural role in future infrastructures, so
that many aspects for information architects are highlighted.
Abstract: Wandora is a generic topic maps based knowledge management suite. This tutorial will introduce the audience to topic maps, Wandora and how to use Wandora to build web applications based on topic maps. Presentation will start with topic map editing in Wandora, at the same time giving a brief introduction to basic topic map concepts. After being familiar with topic map editing features in Wandora, tutorial will continue with building a practical topic map based web application. This will be done importing an existing knowledge base and modifying and augmenting that using editing features in Wandora to suit the needs of the web application being built. Finally the topic map will be published as a web application using Wandora.
Audience: No previous knowledge about topic maps is necessarily needed although at least basic knowledge about topic maps or similar techniques, such as RDF, should make the tutorial easier to follow.
Technology requiremenets: Although not necessary, participants may want to try Wandora either beforehand or during the tutorial on their personal laptops. Wandora can be freely downloaded from www.wandora.net and should run on any modern system with Java Runtime Environment.
Abstract:CTM (Compact Syntax for Topic Maps) is a new part of the ISO standard. CTM is a lightweight text-based notation for representing topic maps and is to be used for manually authoring topic maps. This tutorial introduces CTM and shows how one can build topic maps in this notation. Practical examples are used how one can develop a topic map step by step. Also some typical Topic Maps application use cases are shown on how can generate topic maps from existing legacy datasources. For these use cases we will refer also to some parts of the CTM standard (such as templates) which one might use.
Audience: Participants of this workshop need to know the basics of Topic Maps and is suitable for all levels. People who are interested in CTM, how can manually build topic maps and generate some parts of it can learn from some of these examples.
