George Appel asked me to put my CMAP course ontology in a CMAP public place, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that. Isn’t new technology and networking mechanisms fun. Since it is late on a Friday, I though I would upload my latest PDF of my ontology. Note it is only 5 MB. The PNG format was 17 MB. IF you are wondering why it is so big, I use the ontology as my course notes and it goes into some detail, thus it covers a huge amount of 2 dimensional space.
I am a practicioner of detailed ontologies as they can be used to map out a whole body of knowledge. Each subordinate sub concept becomes its own “topic” which canthen generate a topic “shell” for me or others to author and the ontolgy itself can become a DITA MAP or a book table of contents.
Those of you that are educators that may want to use an ontology to organize your thoughts and then to author in XML so you can publish simultaneously to PDF, html files, or PowerPoint layout style, using the DITA open Toolkit might want to consider using an ontology. You can even use parts of the ontology to create a series or volumes in a body of knowledge. This is great for reuse. You do not need a content management system to manage the ontology, DITA MAP, or topics as it can be done on your local drive. DITA XML gives you the ability impose an information model (which also is designed using the ontology) including versioning (changes/amendments) so you can repusblish earlier or later versions of your work (also known as mulitstreaming).
Tags: CCK08
