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From November 11 - 13, 2009 the 5th International Conference on Topic Maps will take place in Leipzig. What can we expect? What will be the big issues?

TMRA is the main scientific conference around Topic Maps. The motto of TMRA 2009 is Linked Topic Maps, which is inspired by Graham Moore's Vision of a Topic Maps World presented this spring at the Topic Maps Norway 2009 conference in Oslo. It’s about URIs connecting different topics in different topic maps. Linked Topic Maps is an important step on the way to global federated knowledge exchange. It will enable crawlers to walk through a globally interlinked web of topic maps which fits perfectly in the overall vision of the web of data.

This November at TMRA 2009 we will have an extremely dense and exiting program. Around 100 attendees will learn about rising tools, applications, standards and methodologies in the Topic Maps world. With the keynotes the regular talks will be excellently framed by visionary lectures. Michael Sperberg-McQueen is a brilliant head and presenter with strong backgrounds in markup technologies. And Steve Newcomb is one of the founding fathers of Topic Maps. This year the conference will run the first "Best Topic Map Contest" where the most exciting topic map will be elected by the crowd. The latest and most ground-breaking ideas from the community are discussed in the open-space sessions, moderated by Lars Marius Garshol. Furthermore TMRA features a full day of tutorials prior to the regular conference program. At this tutorials day high quality lectures in the field of Topic Maps can be attended. Last but not least I want to emphasis the first Ontopia Code Camp where the participants get introduced to Ontopia, the main open source Topic Maps project today, and learn how the project works, how they can contribute to it, and make use of it.

You have been active in the Topic maps community for quite some years now. What have been recent developments? Where are Topic Maps heading?

To sum up the recent developments: Topic Maps scale to the web. Since the beginnings Topic Maps are used as technology for semantic web portals. In the last years the subject-centric and highly interlinked information architecture of the portals was highlighted as main advantage of Topic Maps. Now we see that the ability of Topic Maps portals to expose and use structured data to and from the web amplifying the original benefits. The main important point: web portals based on Topic Maps frameworks provide this linked data feature inherently.

This summer Ontopia being the most matured, industry-strength and widely adopted Topic Maps framework was released to Open Source. With this immense code base the traction in the community has multiplied. With Ruby Topic Maps our Topic Maps Lab provides a framework to conveniently use Ontopia as backend for semantic portals in Ruby. With this approach we combine the flexibility of Topic Maps with the agility of Ruby and its powerful web framework Ruby on Rails. With Ruby the doors to model driven auto-generation of code, based on the ontology of the underlying topic maps, is wide open.

Very important is the evolving commercial sphere. Networked Planet sells very successfully Topic Maps based MS Sharepoint and SAP solutions. Providing semantic information logistics for standard software seems to be an rising business model. And Topic Maps applications for the iPhone like musicGPS are popping up in the App store.   

To keep track with all the innovations in the Topic Maps field the Lab launches topicmapslab.de/community. There we collect all ongoing developments in the Topic Maps field.

You have recently started an education series about Topic Maps. Can you give us some information on this?

In cooperation with the Leipzig School of Media we have established the Topic Maps Academy program here in Leipzig. I'm really proud about this cooperation, because the Leipzig School of Media is ranked among the leading institutions for continuing education in crossmedia. This year we started with introductory courses around Topic Maps. In 2010 we will provide in-depth seminars around Ruby Topic Maps, Ontopia, Topic Maps in Sharepoint and all Topic Maps standards like the query and schema languages. For all who not want to wait until next year I want to refer to the tutorials day of TMRA 2009 where all these topics are covered too. And last but not least our students at the University are taught in their Master courses. If you like to have a strong Topic Maps profile in your Master studies in CS you should think about coming to the University of Leipzig.

What about Topic Maps and the Semantic Web: How do they fit together?

With the vision of the web of data Topic Maps and the Semantic Web move closer over time. Anywhere URIs represent subjects, structured statements are gathered around them. In this context I see subj3ct.com as an interesting ventures. This recently launched service provides URIs for 15 million subjects to be used in structured data. Naturally, linked data hubs like dbpedia or geonames.org are part of it. The crowd is invited to contribute to this collection, also the Topic Maps Lab provides several feeds to register new URIs. Subj3ct.com turns out to be an infrastructure technology for Web 3.0 applications, regardless whether they are based on Topic Maps or other Semantic Web technologies.

Through this convergence the uniqueness of each technology sharpens. Reasoning is the strong point of the Semantic Web. But the strength of Topic Maps are semantic portals and the global federation of facts around subjects. Bringing together all and even contradictory information about each subject - and not building reasoning-ready consistent models of the world - is built into the genes of Topic Maps.

About Lutz Maicher

Dr. Lutz Maicher is the head of the Topic Maps Lab in Leipzig since its inception. The lab is a research group at the University of Leipzig with around 15 researchers. In recent years he developed the University of Leipzig into an European center of academic excellence regarding Topic Maps technologies.  Since 2005 he is scientific head of the international conference series on Topic Maps, TMRA. Current main expertise and interest are the integration of heterogenous data sources and their ontological coverage. He also works on multi-lingual user input and output, data visualisation and the retrieval of federated  information.