Call for Contributions

TMRA 2009 will be the fifth event in the annual series of international conferences on Topic Maps Research and Applications. TMRA is the advanced scientific and industrial forum whose main object is connecting the key players in the Topic Maps community. Here you will find researchers and users in government and industry, as well as the vendors, the luminaries, and the standards creators gathered for an exchange of ideas in a stimulating setting. TMRA 2009 will take place in the Media Campus Villa Ida, Leipzig, Germany and will be hosted by the Topic Maps Lab.

Besides the keynotes, presented by leading heads of the Topic Maps community, the conference schedule covers parallel science- and industry-oriented tracks, poster and demonstration sessions. The latest ideas from the community are discussed in the open-space sessions.

“Linked Topic Maps” – The Motto of TMRA 2009

A web of globally linked topic maps is behind the Vision of a Topic Maps World that Graham Moore presented at the Topic Maps Norway 2009 conference in Oslo this spring. Linked Topic Maps is the first step on the way to global federated knowledge exchange. It’s about PSIs connecting different topics in different topic maps together. It’s about using protocols like SDShare, and the exchange of Topic Maps fragments. Linked Topic Maps will enable crawlers to walk through a globally interlinked web of topic maps.

The social graph and geo-spatial information globally link topic maps across all domains. And why not linking topic maps with real world objects, stepping into the web of things? And what about walking through topic maps in augmented realities, to link the real life experience with the web of data?

But Linked Topic Maps is also about the semantic integration of heterogeneous sources of structured and unstructured data, based on the integration model provided by Topic Maps. To meet the challenge of exploiting the merging facilities at global scale advanced approaches are needed.

The goal of the TMRA 2009 conference is bringing together all the ideas, concepts and implementations which will help to make true the vision of a web of linked topic maps for global knowledge federation.