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Figure 1. Initial and new Semantic Web architectures
1) may be achieved using Topic Maps.
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and ISO have set
up a task force to make these two standards in-
teroperable. The Semantic Web Best Practices and
Deployment (SWBPD) Working Group supports
the RDF/Topic Map Interoperability Task Force
(RDFTM) to help users who want to combine
data from W3C RDF/OWL and ISO topic maps.
However, there are some differences when it comes
to choosing the right data models.
The topics, associations, and occurrences that
comprise Topic Maps allow users to describe
ontologies. Each data element in a Topic Map
is called a topic. Any term in a thesaurus can be
seen as a topic in Topic Maps. Each topic can be
given multiple names, and it is not necessary to
distinguish between topics with the same names.
This means that the topic Tim Berners-Lee can
be entered as “Tim BL,” “TBL,” or the “Inven-
tor of World Wide Web,” resulting in the same
information, thus solving the synonym problem
(Pepper, 2002a, 2002b) This parallel is an equiva-
lence relationship in a thesaurus (UF and USE).
Associations express relationships between top-
ics, e.g. “Tim Berners-Lee” made “http://www.
w3.org/RDF.” Associations are inherently multi-
directional. The statement Tim Berners-Lee made
http://www.w3.org/RDF automatically implies
the statement http://www.w3.org/RDF was made
by Tim Berners-Lee (see Table 1). Occurrences
two data models; rdF
and topic maps
With the support from the World Wide Web
Consortium, Resource Description Framework
(RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL)
have been used to implement ontology-based in-
formation systems. Unfortunately, RDF is simply
not adequate in the Semantic Web architecture.
In other words, RDF is not suitable as a basis for
both the syntax and semantics of the Semantic
Web (Patel-Schneider, 2005). The necessity of
expressive Semantic Web languages is demanding
(Patel-Schneider, 2005). Even though there are
two ontology languages, RDF and Topic Maps
(TM), most Semantic Web Architecture-related
researchers have focused on RDF. In addition,
there is a lack of guidelines to aide in choosing
between TM and RDF.
three diFFerent PersPeCtives
on toPiC mAPs And rdF
The goal of Topic Maps and RDF is similar, and
some efforts to make these two data models in-
teroperable have also been conducted. The World
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