Talking to some guys at the iCentrum event I discovered these things called topic maps. It's an XML standard which lets you show how things are related to each other, like a book index. Just the sort of structure I was looking for to order Halo's knowledge. Unfortunately nobody yet seems to have published any "common" topic maps - eg for the animal kingdom, or countries or household objects, so I'll have to teach Halo to make her own!
To save you the trouble of reading the spec, the main elements of a topic map are:
- Topic - a subject or object, which may have one or more names
- Occurence - a link to information about a topic (eg a URL to a relevant web page, or a page number in a book)
- Association - a bi-directional link from one topic to another, and some category of association (eg Cat is a Mammal, Chair is a type of Furniture)
Simple huh!
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