CAP is the OASIS Common Alerting Protocol, which is a specification of an XNL format for disseminating warnings of hurricanes, earthquakes, and suchlike. The CAP v1.1 format is mandated by the European R&D project I am working on. This is an inconvenience, because CAP is badly flawed XML standard. I am going to discuss here some of the problems I have had with message identity as defined by CAP. Read more
Compared with the overt structure of ISO Topic Maps, the better-known RDF is free-wheeling anarchy. To make sense of RDF you need to impose additional structures on top of RDF itself; these can be conventions embodied in your program code, or specifications layered on top of RDF like RDF Schema and OWL. I have found that the concepts of topic maps are useful in understanding the work I have been doing with RDF. Here’s an example. Read more
Naturally at New Year we were talking about the philosophical problem of identity and how it manifests in (for example) rules for combining Topic Maps for topics representing identical subjects, and how there are some interesting identity shennanigans in Homestuck. Here’s three of them, plus a bonus webcomic link that (unlike Homestuck) is not 7500 pages long. Read more