References & reading list

Following is a list of recommended reading and/or references to standards, specs, papers, etc. (As time permits we'll try to transfer any entries added in blog comments up into this message as well*.)

Books & Papers

How to Build a Digital Library
Ian Witten, David Bainbridge. ISBN 1-558-60790-0; Morgan Kaufman, 2003.

We've come a long way as a species (despite other setbacks) when you can buy a book with this title that is as accessible as Witten and Bainbridge's excellent book on digital libraries. Their approach centers around the Greenstone implementation, but the principles discussed could be used in any DL application.

XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web
Jack Park, ed., Sam Hunting, Technical Ed., with a foreword by Douglas Engelbart. ISBN ISBN: 0-201-74960-2; Addison Wesley 2002.

Publisher's description: "With contributed chapters written by today's leading Web experts, XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web is designed to be a 'living document' for managing information across the Web's interconnected resources, with a companion Web site and discussion forums.

Essential Classification
Vanda Broughton. ISBN 1-85604-514-5; Facet Publishing 2005.

From the introduction: "Everybody can and does classify, and if we spend so much time and energy classifying the world about us, it is natural to attempt to organize our stores of information about the world. It's necessary, too, to have systems for managing stored information in a way that allow us to find it again — systems that use our human classificatory skills to organize, to match, to predict and to interpret." I met Ms. Broughton, an important UK researcher in Faceted Analytical Theory, at a JISC meeting several years back, and only recently picked up this book — which I wish I'd seen years ago. Given that it was published last year I suppose this is an impossibility, but it's already become an important addition to my canon. The journal Information Research provides a review.

Data and Reality
William Kent; ISBN 1-58500-970-9; 1st Books Library 2000.

As one of the reviewers on Amazon wrote: "This book is a nightmare and it is not for the sqeamish. It tells you the truth about trying to model real systems and the problems you are about to tackle. Surprisingly, most data modellers have been ignoring it's contents for decades. Why? I'm not sure. Buy it and have nightmares! :-)" It should be recommended reading for those who've been drinking the "Semantic Web" kool-aid. As the blurb from Extreme Markup 2003 states, this is "perhaps the best book ever written about the concepts behind data modelling." Bill has posted some excerpts on his web site. He's one of those people I'd really love to spend some time getting to know — one of our wise men.

The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization
Elaine Svenonius; ISBN 10-262-19433-3; MIT Press, 2000.

A description by Roger Sperberg is included in the entry References for the digital library. There's also a review of the book in New Architect by Eugene E. Kim, another review in Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship by Flora Shrode, and the ACM Citation.

Specifications

XML Topic Maps (XTM) 1.0 Specification
Steve Pepper, Graham Moore, eds.

There's a growing body of online information on Topic Maps, and a number of websites devoted to keeping track of new developments, related specifications, etc. I'll try to collect some of those sites here as time permits, but as a start, try

• The Topic Map articles page.
• EasyTopicMaps. This wiki site was overrun by spam and hasn't yet been cleaned up (as of May 2005), but it's still a valuable resource.
• There's also the ISO Topic Maps activity, found on the ISO SC34/WG3 committee home page — this is where the standards work is being done.

* feel free to add entries...