Day 1: Monday, 2009-08-17

• Arrived at Leipzig and the TMLab. Learned about the infrastructure and set up my laptop.
• Got to know most of the team.
• Read the TMLab funding proposal.
• Acquainted myself with the impressive 15’ Ruby on Rails demo .
  It seems this could also be done in Perl with the Catalyst framework .
• Discussed some inspiring hours with Benjamin and Lutz about projects and ideas, including an envisaged demonstrator for a killer application in the IT-forensic domain.
• Tried to install the Perl-based Topic Maps environment TM , release v1.45 of 2009-04-13, by Robert Barta , but failed in my first shot on my windows laptop under Perl 5.10 (did not investigate further). Aha, Robert has also two modules for offering RESTish topic maps services via Catalyst, and works much with Catalyst:
  • TM::IP::Documents
  • TM::IP::Surface
• Enjoyed a relaxed evening in the south of the city, drinking beer outside in a beer garden.

Day 2: Tuesday, 2009-08-18

• Read a draft roadmap for the lab’s planned Ruby-based TM environment Maiana (not yet public).
• Participated in the TMLab status meeting.
• Participated in a meeting with interested stakeholders from the toxicology domain and discussed ideas on this envisaged portal, and first steps towards a demonstrator.
• Managed to install an Ubuntu 8.04 VMWare image on my windows laptop.
• Within this image, finally managed to install Robert Barta’s TM (TM | his blog entry on the TM-1.45 bugfix release ), using Perl 5.8, after satisfying all dependencies with CPAN, and apt-get (BerkeleyDB, LibXML2), making apt-get use the right repository. Wow! Played a bit with it and tried out some of the tricks in his Perl TM tutorials (Part I-X)
• Carefully read Jack Park ’s PhD thesis proposal on the federation of IBIS conversations about same subjects, and skyped an hour with him.
  • Software agents would propose sameness to users for review, based on TMRM ideas (SubjectMap, Legend, SubjectProxy).
  • Jack suggested to use the open-source research and bibliography platform Zotero (a firefox plugin), and the semantic media wiki, as tools for knowledge gardening. One could write services to access zotero information as topic maps (as a live mapper?). This could e.g. be done via SQLite (installed SQLite::DB
  • He further suggested the Hypertext Knowledge Workbench in combination with Zotero.
  • Installed Zotero and the CDS tools bundle with the Hypertext Knowledge Workbench
• Out in town with Benjamin drinking beer, discussing also topic maps and ideas for start-ups.

Day 3: Wednesday, 2009-08-19

• Oh, Robert Barta is extending his TMQL implementation into a programming language for geosemantic networks, with parts in Haskell and Perl. It is called TempleScript. What will this mean for the future of TM in Perl?
• Played quite some time with Zotero 2.0 beta, entering my TopicMaps-related publications, and synced them to the group TopicMaps
• Updated my profile and publications on the TMLab page
• Further played with TM and tutorials.
• #include < stdio_beer_in_town.h >

Day 4: Thursday, 2009-08-20

• Reviewed four TMRA09 submissions
• Played with Lutz Maicher’s Bibliographic Topic Map , added my PSI there to my profile on the TMLab page. However, subj3ct.com does not seem to add it to my other PSI, even after 12 hours.
• Revived some of my older topic maps from 2003 on (ICLO, Kuchenheim, FRBR, Zaderecki, Thaller, …), donated them to the public domain as test maps, and tried to load them with current environments (TM, Ontopia 5.0).
  • Failed to load most of my LTM 1.3 maps with TM, probably Robert only supported some functionality. Worked fine with tinyTim.
• chilled at an outdoor music event with picknick and beer

Day 5: Friday, 2009-08-21

• Restored yesterday’s changes to this page (were somehow lost)
• Commented on the emails by Jack Park and Dino Karabeg (“Towards a knowledge federation/gardening infrastructure, based on domain maps and subject maps”)

Day 6: Monday, 2009-08-24

• Learned how to use Eclipse unit tests with the lab’s TMQL java implementation
• Crafted a scenario in the forensic data analysis domain, with collusion between buyer and vendor, etc., and manually created documents and a corresponding LTM topic map.

Day 7: Tuesday, 2009-08-25

• Participated in the lab’s weekly meeting, this time mainly on the envisaged Maiana features
• Discussed with people in forensic data analysis how a Topic Maps-based approach might support the aggregation of facts in cases
• Further played with TM::QL
• Further commented upon knowledge federation ideas/first specification sketch (Dino, Jack), and created a knowledge_federation group at Zotero.
• Out in town drinking beer with Lutz and Benjamin

Day 8: Wednesday, 2009-08-26

• Played a bit with n3 and UBI
• Tried to get TM::QL working as I wanted, but had a hard time
• Wrote some tolog queries
• Got simple Catalyst stuff working - my first time with this cool framework
• Found out how to work with Catalyst::Controller::REST , together with TMQL
• Learned about JTM (JASON Topic Maps)
• Documented how to use the things in the vmware image I created so far.

Day 9: Thursday, 2009-08-27

• Presented the domain scenario in forensic data analysis and what I did with Perl-TM/Catalyst stuff so far to some lab members

Day 10: Friday, 2009-08-28

More details likely to follow.