April 4, 2008
[topicmaps] The ontology of Duckberg
Birte Fallet, Kjersti Haukaas and Asbjørn Risan present a topic map of Donald Duck’s world. It cameou t of a master course at Oslo University, with Steve Pepper as tutor.
They show the surprisingly full Duck family tree and the topic map of the relationships. Quackmore is the father of Donald and Della. [See? We learn stuff every day! They made special relationships for cousin, uncle, etc. [Why not infer this from the tree? Possibly because they decided to exclude known members who do not participate in stories.] Some relationships are symmetric, and some are asymmetric. They have a special association type for “unrequited love.” And some characters switch occupations. In fact, Donald seems to have a different job in juist about every episode: museum guard, factory worker, dog catcher… They attached the occuptations to the stories. They’ve captured a lot of detail. [But not a taxonomy of Entertainers Without Pants]
They found topic maps to provide “associative richness,” flexible, easy to learn and “Quite fun actually.” The map is here
