Topic Maps (ISO/IEC 13250)

The closing keynote presentation of Topic Maps 2008 containing the fullest exposition of my take on subject-centric computing and how it has the potential to revolutionize information management. My swan song as far as Topic Maps is concerned. At least for now.

Topic Maps is an international standard technology for describing knowledge structures and using them to improve the findability of information. It is based on a formal model that subsumes those of traditional finding aids such as indexes, glossaries, and thesauri, and extends them to cater for the additional complexities of digital information.

Topic Maps is increasingly used in Enterprise Information Integration, Knowledge Management, e-Learning, and Digital Libraries, and as the foundation for web-based information delivery solutions. This entry provides a comprehensive treatment of the core concepts, as well as describing the background and current status of the standard and its relationship to traditional knowledge organization techniques.

Considering the characteristics of hypertext systems and problems such as cognitive overload and the disorientation of users, this project studies subject hypertext documents that have undergone conceptual structuring using facets for content representation and improvement of information retrieval during navigation. The main objective was to assess the possibility of the application of topic map technology for automating the compatibilization process of these structures. For this purpose, two dissertations from the UFMG Information Science Post-Graduation Program were adopted as samples. Both dissertations had been duly analyzed and structured on the MHTX (Hypertextual Map) prototype database. The faceted structures of both dissertations, which had been represented in conceptual maps, were then converted into topic maps. It was then possible to use the merge property of the topic maps to promote the semantic interrelationship between the maps and, consequently, between the hypertextual information resources proper. The merge results were then analyzed in the light of theories dealing with the compatibilization of languages developed within the realm of information technology and librarianship from the 1960s on. The main goals accomplished were: (a) the detailed conceptualization of the merge process of the topic maps, considering the possible compatibilization levels and the applicability of this technology in the integration of faceted structures; and (b) the production of a detailed sequence of steps that may be used in the implementation of topic maps based on faceted structures.

Nowadays, data handled by an institution or company is spread out by more than one database and lots of documents of different types. To extract the information implicit in that data, it is necessary to pick parts from those various archives. To obtain a general overview, those information slices should be integrated. Different approaches can be followed to achieve that integration, ranging from the merge of resources till the fusion of the extracted parts. In this paper, we introduce Metamorphosis – a Topic Maps oriented environment that enables a conceptual navigation among heterogenous information systems – and we argue that Metamorphosis can be used to achieve, via Topic Maps, the referred semantic integration.

This topic map was generated from the 2011 data set of the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS):
Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info.)

Our poster presents some basis which lead us to redesign the Project EA-2003-52 suportted by the Spanish Ministry of Education about subject gateways, and at the same time tries to open a discussion about a new paradigm: Topic Maps, which is not very widespread, nowadays, but we think it can be interesting to incorporate into software engineering projects as a technical terminology. Not only it is new profound paradigm shift but also an unknown vision of how to represent knowledge in a smart way. Can concept maps be topic maps?

Resumen Las políticas de la Unión Europea para la sociedad de la información están impulsando un modelo educativo basado en adquisición de competencias y el aprendizaje a lo largo de la vida. La eficacia del aprendizaje en este modelo educativo descansa en una educación digital, en la que los recursos digitales estructuren, organicen y representen su contenido acorde con sus potencialidades educativas. La Biblioteconomía y Documentación puede contribuir a su consecución mediante la actualización de sus instrumentos a partir de su diseño conceptual en el análisis documental del contenido. Se analizan tesauros, mapas conceptuales y ontologías, que constituyen diversos sistemas de representación del conocimiento procedentes de diferentes disciplinas, y se realiza una comparativa en cuanto a su eficacia para la organización de contenidos en educación para el espacio digital.

This paper describes some of the basic steps in applying Topic Maps in a real world application, a topic map-driven web portal of conference papers. It covers the tasks of collecting and examining source data, defining an ontology and populating a topic map. It discusses tools for automatically creating topic maps, with particular emphasis on how the synergies between Topic Maps and RDF can be exploited in the process of autogenerating topic maps from structured and semi-structured source data. It also provides an introduction to the concept of published subjects, describes how they are being applied in this project and details the benefits that they are expected to bring in both this and other projects.

This paper presents a collaborative semantic tracking framework based on topic maps which aims to integrate and organize the data/information resources that spread throughout the Internet in the manner that makes them useful for tracking events such as natural disaster, and disease dispersion. We present the architecture we defined in order to support highly relevant semantic management and to provide adaptive services such as statistical information extraction technique for document summarization. In addition, this paper also carries out a case study on disease dispersion domain using the proposed framework.

This paper describes some of the basic steps in applying Topic Maps in a real world application, a topic map-driven web portal of conference papers. It covers the tasks of collecting and examining source data, defining an ontology and populating a topic map. It discusses tools for automatically creating topic maps, with particular emphasis on how the synergies between Topic Maps and RDF can be exploited in the process of autogenerating topic maps from structured and semi-structured source data. It also provides an introduction to the concept of published subjects, describes how they are being applied in this project and details the benefits that they are expected to bring in both this and other projects.

Information overload which we witness in all the areas of intellectual work has its negative influence at the universities preventing students from effective selection and understanding of most important stuff and its relationships in studied disciplines. The objective of this paper ...

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is an open organization engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. Its most important standard is the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set [DCMES], a vocabulary of fifteen properties for use in resource description, which was approved as ISO 15836:2003. This and other vocabularies developed by Dublin Core are defined as abstract models which may be expressed in any number of different syntaxes. This paper presents a proposal for expressing such metadata using Topic Maps

Topic Maps is a new ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associating themwith information resources. As such it constitutes an enabling technology for knowledge management. Dubbed “the GPS of the information universe”, topic maps are also destined to provide powerful new ways of navigating large and interconnected corpora. While it is possible to represent immensely complex structures using topic maps, the basic concepts of the model – Topics, Associations, and Occurrences (TAO) – are easily grasped. This paper  provides a non-technical introduction to these and other concepts (the IFS and BUTS of topicmaps), relating them to things that are familiar to all of us from the realms of publishing and information management, and attempting to convey some idea of the uses to which topicmaps will be put in the future.

This paper presents a collaborative semantic tracking framework based on topic maps which aims to integrate and organize the data/information resources that spread throughout the Internet in the manner that makes them useful for tracking events such as natural disaster, and disease dispersion. We present the architecture we defined in order to support highly relevant semantic management and to provide adaptive services such as statistical information extraction technique for document summarization. In addition, this paper also carries out a case study on disease dispersion domain using the proposed framework.