The Goldfish Chronicles

Tonight’s research was Topic Maps. I hit a blog entry concerning them today (forget whose) and realised that this is the Nth time they’ve hit my radar and I need to stop saying “Topic Maps? What’re they?”.

I printed up the TAO of Topic Maps and brought it home to peruse.

My rule for tasks on particular nights is just that I do something on them. It may be nothing more than tidy up the Wiki page for Lang, but it still counts as a success on Saturday’s Commons task. Usually it’s more. Tonight I only read the article, but I uncovered a new part of my future routine: reading printouts on the exercise bike.

We bought an exercise bike a month or so ago and I started using it two weeks ago. I would read while I cycled and manage to multi-task, which makes me happy. However, books are a pain on an exercise bike and technical books are far too much a pain. Tonight I realised that print-ups of articles/pdfs/white-papers are perfect (well, not the 400 page xsl-fo spec).

So every night will now include reading an article on the bike. I already have a host printed up at work where I always take one to the toilet (cue joke of useful if you run out of toilet paper).

Anyway. Topic Maps seem interesting. Mainly because I’m a closet librarian and they borrow a lot from indexing of books, which is really the same concept as classifying books (to a layman; ie me). The last time I recall them being mentioned was the suggestion that they might be a solution to mail list categories. People would, I assume, flag their email as matching a set of topics and users would then pick them up. So for someone interested in classloading, they would just listen to classloading@apache and not to every mail list.

They also exist in a similar world to some of the things that interest me in Roller, so I think I’l read some more on them on another research night. Or on the bike if I can find more good articles.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 13th, 2004 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Family etc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.