Biosphere Data Project

[ To be placed here: A brief discussion of ontologies, classification, and other artificial intelligence topics, and how they have been used in environmental applications. ]

Topic Maps
This is the Infoloom resource site for Topic Map work. Charles F. Goldfarb says that this standard is "opening the way for a 'global positioning system for the Web.'" The official standard is here.

Structured Maps: Modeling Explicit Semantics over a Universe of Information
An article by Lois Delcambre.

Knowledge Mapping tools
A resource page with a Wiki flavor initiated by DenhamGrey (now Wiki, that's a real story).

Knowledge Mapping Experiment
This links to a mockup page depicting an earlier experiment. We considered using some software from Lucid for an experimental portion of the Biosphere site that would enable site visitors to collaboratively build a browsable hierarchy of relationships between different concepts and terms. In the Lucid software, a central pane is surrounded by blocks of links categorized as parents, siblings, children, and other forms of jumps within the hierarchy. Each topical link calls up specific content to the central pane and adjusts the hierarchical relationships surrounding it to reflect the user's new location in the tree. Users can create new nodes and new relationships between them. Each node can contain content such as links and text.

Knowledge-Based Systems and Ontologies
If you want to engage in better collaboration with machines, you might use these resources from Peter Clark at the University of Texas to explore artificial intelligence, natural language recognition, and other efforts to teach computers to act with common sense and contextual knowledge.