|
As some bumblebees already know, Bumblehood portal is powered by BumbleMap, a software platform for collaborative knowledge management. The introductory article about BumbleMap platform portrays its key features and pinpoints utilization of the topic maps paradigm as one of its bedrocks. Topic maps are a form of semantic web technology for knowledge representation, and in this blog post, I would like to explain a bit why we chose to employ them in BumbleMap. Also, I will try to give my perspective on how Bumblehood fits the semantic web area in general.
The key idea behind semantic web is adding a well-defined meaning to information on the web (typically in the form of semantic annotations) in order to provide more powerful searching capabilities and allow better processing and understanding of data. These characteristics, at least in theory, bring benefits to both kinds of web users – people and machines – making development in the area of semantic web even more appealing. Although 8 years have already passed since the term semantic web first appeared in public (in a Scientific American article), its repercussions among web users, however, are disputable at best. The fact that the web world has not been turned inside out as some might have expected is hardly unanticipated, but it comes as a bit of a surprise that even 8 years later no “mainstream” semantic web application seems to be successfully solving a problem of general public’s interest.
When the Bumblehood project started, the possible benefits it could have from semantic web technologies, and, in particular, the topic maps paradigm, were not evident at first. Only when problems pertaining to consistent organization and presentation of Bumblehood content about geographical locations and businesses arose, the topic maps paradigm came out as a natural path to follow. I find this worth mentioning because I believe that one of the reasons for the public perception that not much progress has been made in the semantic web area is a lack of well-motivated applications dealing with problems that people care about and for which the semantic web technology can provide a good solution. I am even under impression that many applications that emerged around the semantic web hype suffer from clear identification of the goals they are supposed to achieve. And even those that are clear about the goals have hard times bringing the underlying solution to their users without sacrificing usability of the application and the overall user experience (e.g., see the story of Twine).
Back to Bumblehood, the topic maps paradigm helped us not only to overcome the difficulties with information organization, but it also opened us a way for presenting Bumblehood content in a structured form that is easy to navigate. The approach you now see in Bumblehood is the one we found the most appropriate for the kind of semantic relationships among information entities that are present in the Bumblehood content. One might argue that the tree-based visualization of Bumblehood topics is utterly simple and does not appear as the most general approach one could come up with in order to lay out arbitrary semantic structures (e.g. check this project providing an API for visualizing graph and tree structures in a hyperbolic geometry). We are not trying to dispute such efforts, however, we firmly believe that it is wisest to keep things simple (of course, not simpler than that:) and use only what is necessary in order to defeat the problem. Only time will tell whether a tree-based visualization could be the right approach for “mainstream” semantic web applications in general, but even if it does not turn out to be so, we are convinced that we made the right choice for Bumblehood by using it.
Keeping in mind that “best things come in small packages”, I conclude this blog post, and announce its next part in which I will delve more into the role of topic maps in Bumblehood and dissect how this paradigm is applied in the domain of Bumblehood content.
Posted by Matko Botincan on May 6th, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software team --- Comments on Forum
