Sorry if you receive this message more than once, due to overlapping of the
mailing lists ...

The Semantopic Map Project is taking off the ground.

Short review for those not still aware of this project :
The purpose is the collaborative building of a Topic Map directory for
people, organizations, tools, projects and events in the Semantic Web,
Topic Maps and other related knowledge communities. A good idea of the
scope of this project is for example given by the meeting of "knowledge
communities" last week at Austin for the first Knowledge Technologies
Conference :
http://www.gca.org/attend/2001_conferences/kt_2001/default.htm

The details, entry point and actuality for this project can be found for
the moment at :
www.universimmedia.com/semantopic.htm

The Semantopic Map will be addressable through two interfaces :

The first interface is an authoring tool, powered by Mondeca Software,
enabling collaborative on-line management of the data base.
Volunteer editors will be enabled to add on-line new topics, associations
and occurrences.

The second interface, navigation-only, consists in html pages prepublished
from the data base, with navigation based on the associations in the Map.

The authoring tool has been available since the beginning of March, and may
be used to discover the Map through "anonymous" login. Start from the above
quoted address. The navigation html interface is just about to be released
... a week or so.

I've started a mailing list for the discussion and management of this
project. See : http://www.freelists.org/list/semantopic
To send to this list : semantopic@...

I hope this project will provide both a community-building tool and an
interesting and interactive use case of collaborative Topic Map building in
a complex, open universe. It will certainly raise many exciting technical,
ontological and process issues.

Looking forward for semantopic collaboration ...

---------------------------------------
Bernard Vatant
www.universimmedia.com
---------------------------------------