Our philosophy

Our goal is to make solutions in the areas of content management, knowledge management and learning management (CAL software) for the modern information society. Our technological choices depends on this goal.

Currently, our solutions are mainly based on the Topic Maps standard. Topic Maps has attributes that makes it particularly well suited to support good learning processes, by providing intuitive and effective ways of navigating documented knowledge. Topic Maps is a technology that enables the knowledge structures themselves to work as a map (or an index) of the knowledge. Hence the map is automatically updated as knowledge is acquired and knowledge structures are built. This opens the way for dynamic indexing, which has a positive effect on navigation and overview.

Everything in Topic Maps is centered around topics, occurrences and associations. A topic can be anything (often with a name assigned to it, e.g. 'Mr. Jones'), occurrences are resources related to the topics (e.g. a CV for Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones' phone number, etc. ), and associations show the relations between the topics. If thinking of bits of knowledge as being documented through topics and occurrences, the associations will show how the bits relate, and hence making the foundation for a knowledge structure. Acknowledging that relating bits of knowledge to build a knowledge structure in itself gives new knowledge, one will also build ontological structures that are based directly on the knowledge itself, which in them selves form usable navigation tools.

In a learning situation this is especially useful, as most people learn by building associative knowledge structures during the learning process. By documenting the knowledge in a tool that is based on Topic Maps, it will be easier to see how the knowledge is developed. It also gives the possibility of using the recorded knowledge as documentation later on (e.g. as a reference, for repetition, evaluation, etc.).

To learn more about topic maps, we recommend the 'Topic Maps starter pack', that can be downloaded for free from Ontopia's web site.

Open Source

To follow up on and support the open shared informational networks of the future, our goal is to support development of and use of open source software and open standards, as well as supporting the development of standards which lead to open and public access to knowledge. Our goal is hence to use and do further development on open source software in our projects.

Open source content management software such as Drupal makes it possible to build the community based web sites for sharing and cooperation of the future with simple measures. Sharing, and the possibility of letting anyone contribute to a site's content are features that make this software a good solution for building web sites serving future learning resources.

Other similar open source web frameworks like Zope with ZTM give us the possibility of building similar web sites as mentioned for Drupal which are based on topic maps. On example is Kuling.net which is a community portal where memebers can join building a common knowledge base for culture in the Vesterålen region of the northern Norway. The topic map makes it possible to represent any object or resource as a topic and to add related resources to any other resource, making it possible for any given place in the region to navigate and access cultural artifacts etc. The use of topic maps also brings us toward the future of the web in it being a semantic technology, giving us the possibility to implement concepts which form the basis for Web 2.0 and the Semantic web.