Topics Maps: The Next Big Thing?
December 20, 1999
Topic maps was a recurring topic in several presentations. I did not attend the main
discussions about topic maps, but from what I heard, I wish I had.
Topic maps appear to be a metadata effort akin to RDF
that are, among other things, a
simple and powerful way to represent indices and glossaries,
as well as a solid foundation for powerful browsing and searching.
They are a layering of associative information on top of a data set.
Topics are connected to all related objects called occurrences,
each of which has a role.
Topics have names and a specified scope, consisting of themes.
As speakers from STEP UK Ltd. indicated,
each topic has a type, an "is-a" relationship in object-oriented terminology.
Knowledge management (KM) tries to represent associations, such as
is-in, born-in, collaborated-with relationships.
Imagine the power of being able to ask such sophisticated questions (queries) like:
"What composition was written by a German composer who was influenced by Mozart?"
The following quote is from
Topic Maps at a Glance:
Topic Maps are the online equivalent of printed indexes, and it happens that they can
do more: they are a powerful way to manage link information, such as glossaries, cross-references,
thesauri, catalogs, they enable the merging of structured, unstructured information.
The quote below is from the topic maps tutorial.
The Topic Maps International Standard (ISO/IEC 13250:1999) provides a standard
syntax for interchanging the information needed to support collaborative creation
and maintenance of finding aids such as indexes and glossaries. Topic Maps
permit such index modeling information to be maintained separately from the
materials that are indexed. User interfaces to topic-map-based applications can
dynamically reconfigure themselves in powerful and surprising ways, based on
user profile information, such as the user's preferred natural language, skill level,
security clearance, task requirements, etc.
Major sources of information about topic maps include:
WebMethods: B2B Trading Networks
What Happened at XML'99
XLink/XPointer Tool: X2X
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