Topic Maps, 10 years down the line

I'm told, by way of my own imagination based on loose rumors put out by flying pink fairies, that Topic Maps is a waning technology, poorly supported by the IT industry at large, hard to wrap your head around, and generally icky to deal with.

All of this is, unfortunately, true.

But, as in all stories told by only one side, there is an other side just waiting to come out into the light, just one day, real soon now. This day may never come, but here is my own little attempt to shed some light on a few of the issues with the Topic Maps world. It was about 10 years ago I first got a whiff of Topic Maps, so my first post in 2010 seems fitting to take some Topic Maps rumors, loose observations and vague statements, and make some comments along the way. Here we go ;

1. Topic Maps are hard

Why, yes, to a commoner or some person with a somewhat traditional approach to computing, Topic Maps can indeed seem like an alien concept at first. The first time I started reading up on it I was mesmerized and frightened at the same time, wondering where the magic would bring me and just how painful it would be for me when reality would kick in (and me) ; there were new notions and concept, new words, new paradigms everywhere! Reification, role types, associations, occurrences, occurrence type, typified information, subjects and topics, ontologies (upper, lower, specialized ones) the list goes on. It is terrifying indeed, and for many, many people they are so terrifying that SQL and C# and .Net and C and PHP seems like a comforting auntie lulling you back into things we know and know well, no hard thinking required (just lots of hair to pull out).

Until you realize a few things, that is. For example, the vocabulary is anchored in information science, and with a bit of research or learning it shouldn't take that long to get familiar with it. Even the complex issues of reification and ontologies after some time will be as normal and self-explainable as second-cousins and language. (And yes, there is a correlation between the examples given! See if you can find them!) And perhaps more importantly, the problems you can solve with Topic Maps can completely and utterly eradicate the major problems those traditional methods give us, one of the biggest bug-bears that I'd ever had! (Anyone wish to offer me a book deal on how to solve most of the main IT development problems in seriously interesting ways? :)

Can I just mention that having an small epiphany about Topic Maps have the effect of you never returning to the real world and look at it the same way, ever again? I have never met a person who got Topic Maps return to the old ways, at least not without making huge compromises. Getting it will change you in good ways, and is most definitely worth the effort despite the pain.

Tips to newbies: It's not really hard, even if it seems hard. But it requires you to change your mind on some key issues.

2. Topic Maps are poorly supported in the real-world

Oh yes, indeed. If you talk to anyone, any company in your immediate serenity (yes, a tautologically pun) and ask them about their use of Topic Maps, you'd most likely get a blank stare back and a careful "What would we need maps for?"

There's the odd technical-inclined person who might now a toddle about what these fabled Topic Maps are all about, but very, very few people understand what they are, and even less have implemented them into something useful. (The exception to this is, oddly enough, the country of Norway, and some scantily-clad areas of southern Germany) No mainstream software package comes with the stuff wrapped in, no word-processor touts its amazingness, no operating system comes with support for it, and no popular software of any kind use it.

But then, there's the odd system that use it. You'll find it also in the odd Norwegian government portal, which is bizarre in its own right, and perhaps deep down in some academic underfunded project or perhaps some commercial project where parts of the data-model masquerades as it. My old website use it. I have a framework or two. There's the odd other open-source project, a few API's, and a host of other well-meaning but obscure projects that perhaps has got it, albeit well hidden and kept away from children.

For a technology that stands out as something that can fix it all, I find it bizarre that it is found so seldom, but then bizarre is not the same as surprised. And when you look at the "competition", the well-funded, well-marketed, well-established world of the Semantic Web, championed by none other than the W3C and Tim Berners-Lee, well you have to concede that it shouldn't be much of a surprise at all, really. Topic Maps is a tiny group of enthusiasts (a few hundred, being liberal with statistics) who'll saw off their right leg if it meant we could get the specs done in time, while the Semantic World is littered with academia, organisations and companies (we're talking thousands upon thousands of people actively working on it), so no, you should not be surprised.

Tips to newbies: As the saying go, if a million flies eat it ... surely, it has some nutritional value or greater worth over, say, that green grass the cows are dumping it on?

3. Topic Maps is dying and obsolete; use RDF instead

There was a period about 10 years ago which I regard as the Topic Maps time of bloom ; the trees had beautiful flowers on, the pink and purple petals falling over the world of IT like a slow-motion rainfall of beauty. Everywhere you turned there was people talking about it and potential projects popping all the time.

But times went by. Topic Maps was too hard for most (see point 1 and 2), and not just the technical implications themselves and the language and terms used, but also the philosophy of it, the very idea of why we should be using it over, say, any relational database or traditional software stack. I mean, what's the point, really?

The point is easy to miss, admittedly. A technology that can be used for everything is hard to pin down and said to be good for something. And we have focused just too damn much on knowledge management systems, and not only that, but used our own special language in the process which often is quite remote from knowledge management speech in the enterprise arena (but you find it rife in academia). When the world looks to Topic Maps, all they see is a difficult way to do knowledge management. Ugh.

Myself, I'm using Topic Maps in highly non-traditional ways. I use maps for my application (definitions, actions and functionality), for functional topology (generic functionality in hyper-systems based on typification), for business logic (rules, conditions, interactions) and, perhaps just as important, for the actual development itself (modules and plugins, deployment, versioning, services) which makes for a highly (and this "highly" is quite higher than any normally used "highly") customizable and flexible framework for making great semantic applications. But more on the details at some later stage.

Tips for newbies: No, it's not dead nor dying, just not as popular as stuff that's easier or more accessible

4. Topic Maps is nothing new

Well, given its roughly 20 year history (and I'm counting from early days of HyTyme), in Internet years it's an old, old dog, so by that alone we can't say there's anything new, but most people would mean "new" here to mean something like "we've been doing X for years, so why do we need this?", where X usually points to some bit of the Topic Maps paradigm that indeed has been done before. Of course it has. There is nothing new in Topic Maps except, of course, putting it all together and standardize one cohesive and complete way of doing pretty damn most of what you would need for your complex data-model, identity management, semantic or otherwise relational, interoperable information and / or structural need, chucking in knowledge management, too, for good measure.

There are of course nothing new with Topic Maps, except that all that old stuff is bundled into a new thing, if you allow a 20 year old standard to be called "new." But then again, "the standard" is really a family of standards, all evolving and changing with the times. There's always a sub-standard (no pun intended ... well, not a lot of pun intended) in the woodworks, always some half-baked document to explain something or other, always something that is so damn specific and concise that the overall grooviness and funky bits are pushed to the side-lines.

Topic Maps is new and old at the same time, but it really is groovy and funky once you overcome the technical jargon and the concise nature of the standards.

Tips to newbies: The king is dead. Long live the king!

5. The Topic Maps community is, um, a bit tricky

Oh, yes indeed. And this one is the hardest to write about as I'm part of this community and know pretty much everyone, some more than others.

So let's say it this way; I'm a difficult person in certain ways, for example I talk a lot, I overflow with ideas rather than code, I don't care too much about political correctness, and I speak my mind and use language that could alienate people with too strong attachments to their ties or their social buckets.

And the core of the Topic Maps community is loaded with weirdos like me; highly opinionated, rough ideas, hard on woo, and soft on business. But the problem isn't the weirdos, but the low number of them. Any successful community with such a wide-ranging and all-encompassing area of what Topic Maps is all about (which is, uh, almost anything) going from epistemology to identity management to ontology work, well, you need a lot of personalities to match them all to make it seem like a lively place. We, on the other hand, have a handful of people, and the contrast between us all is sometimes just too great. And, I've noticed, we're not very good with newbies, either, so even if we answer their questions, quite often our answers are just too far out there for normal people to comprehend (and I've got a ton of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence to back it up).

I'm part of many different communities on the web, but there is only one champion of how fast an online discussion goes private (and it's not of the good kind; it's the kind where we need to express our frustrations in private [because, ultimately, we're nice people who don't want to offend anyone even when they deserve it, those bastards], lest we blow up and our eyes will bleed!), and that's the community which is located on a private server where you must write to the list owner in an email to be added. *sigh*

I tried my "question of the week" thing on the mailing-list for a while, and some of those went well, but too many of those question quickly descended into nothing or private arenas. So, I'm officially giving up on it for now. Maybe I'll come back stronger once my spine grows back, who knows?

Tips for newbies: Be strong, keep at it, ask for clarification! We don't know just how alien we are. And please join in as we need more weirdos.

6. What, exactly, is Topic Maps, anyways? I don't get it!

Yes, indeed, what exactly is this darn Topic Maps thing? The funny thing is that there is no correct answer to that question. First of all, it's a family of standards that we collectively call "Topic Maps", but it could also mean either the TMDM (Topic Maps Data Model) standard or the XTM (Topic Maps XML exchange format) XML standard, depending on your non-sexual preferences. Some might even go out on a limb (obviously not the limb cut off in point no. 2) and claim that it means the TMRM (Topic Maps Reference Model) which is a more abstract framework, or possibly even just the philosophical direction - or, dare I say it, zeitgeist? - of the thing, like a blueprint for how to build a key-value recursive property framework with identity- and knowledge management system. Your mileage may vary.

But then we have a problem as it is not a technology nor a format. It is more akin to a language, a model or a direction of sorts. No, not a language like SQL (even though the TMQL (Topic Maps Query Language) could be said to hold that place) that is to be parsed by a computer, nor a language like Norwegian or English. No, we're talking about a language that sits right in the middle between the computer and the human, a kind of mediator or translator, a model in which both machine and human can do things that each part understands equally well, a model which is defined through information science, math and human language.

So what is it? It's a language that both computers and humans can use without pulling too much in either direction, a language in the middle that, if spoken by many parties (computers and humans both), they can all join hands and sing beautiful knowledge management songs together, share and propagate with ease. But of course, Topic Maps isn't limited to just knowledge management, oh no. You can solve unsurmountable things with it as you can make it represent whatever you want it to, and I really, truly mean anything. If you want a topic to represent your thing, off you go. It's that flexible.

It can work as the basis for pretty much any system that has structures in it of any kind or shape, and that, by and large, is pretty much any system ever built. So it's actually quite hard to explain just what you can use it for, even though traditionally it's content management, portals and knowledge management.

Tips to newbies: It's only a model ...

So there you go, a quick summary of bits and bobs about Topic Maps. In my next installment, I'll summarize my naval fluff collection, next the train-table changes of Minnamurra station of the last 10 years, and finally I thought I'd summarize all the redundant technology that's gathering dust in my garage. Stay tuned for exciting times ahead!