Downloaded! Looking forward to reading it through.

Let me know what you think. I was meaning to find a clever way of doing this presentation in a downloadable form that leaves the notes as a narrative to the slides, but haven't come up with anything. The only thing I can think of is some form of Flash application that can record my voice over me sliding the show, or even created a video of it ... albeit, massive downloads and lots of work to get going. Any clues, anyone?

Nice presentation! I like the approach of starting with data modelling as I guess that most people that are getting into topic maps at this early stage probably understand modelling in some form (be it as a software developer or an information management professional). What I think is missing from this is in the one place (slide #100) where you gloss 'The data model being already set in stone' - sure the topic maps data model is set in stone (which I presume you are referring to here) but the application data model almost certainly is not set in stone. The question is can topic maps provide a help or a hinderance to development of an application data model ? I think both you and I have a gut-feeling that they can help, but how can you express that ?

Slide #17, ISO stands for the International Organisation for Standardisation (the acronym is a compromise for French-speakers)

Slide #73ish Hey, wouldn't it be great if there were some sort of shared ontology for a common thing like a thesaurus. Wouldn't it be nice if that were published somewhere, like...ooh...I don't know...how about http://www.techquila.com/psi/thesaurus :-)

Thanks for those comments, Kal. Heh, I was wondering about that #17, but thought it was yet another silly OWL acronym. :)

#100 and its siblings are interesting, and something that I'd like to work quite a bit more on. The big need in companies is exactly how to share their data, and shared ontologies helping in creating application data models is the light at the end of the next tunnel, I'm sure of it. But yes, how to express that? :)

At #73ish, I'll use your PSI's for sure. Thanks for the pointer. Again I'm a victim of 'living in my own TM world'. :)

As an aside, I'm getting back into TM4J again, after a long sleep, trying now to create an 'enterprise' (stupid word) environment where shared ontologies and map repositories are possible. have you done any such work? (Oh, and I found some bugs in running the examples of the latest version, but I'll file bug reports for them.)

I was able to download it too - - Am looking forward to reading it too -- esp like your disclaimer!

Priya