Talk:Topic map

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The following was originally on Topicmaps and should probably be merged with this article:

Topicmaps is an ISO standard for knowledge representation in xml. It is well suited as an infrastructure for the Semantic_Web, and has many similarities to Resource_Description_Framework. One of topicmaps distinct features is it's convention of using url as id's for subjects called public subject identifiers or psi. Since topicmaps is a general data model for knowledge, almost any kind of datasource can be converted to a topicmap. With the aid of public subject identifiers it is also possible merge lot's of different topicmaps so they appear to be one topicmap. At the time being several new standards are under development for querying, manipulating and defining constraints for topicmaps.

Eleusis 14:16, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

The article says: "Dubbed "the GPS of the information universe", topic maps are also destined to provide powerful new ways of navigating large and interconnected corpora." I'm curious as to Wikipedia policies: This sentence is speculation; should an encyclopedia contain forward-looking statements like this? Dirk Riehle 13:02, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

No, it shouldn't. I've taken it out. -R. S. Shaw 01:33, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

The standard is explicit that the technology is called "Topic Maps", and that "topic map" means an actual instance of the model (a real topic map), and likewise that "topic maps" refers to multiple "topic map"s. So the title of the article, as well as the language throughout, should change. Lars Marius Garshol, 2006-03-09

[edit] Status?

Anybody familiar with the current status of this thing? After poking around a bit, it seems to me there was a flurry of activity on it in 1999-2001, and almost nothing has happened since. Have they ever been used in non-toy applications? -R. S. Shaw 01:33, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Having just returned from a sold-out Topic Maps conference, Emnekart Norge 2006, 29 March 2006 (program), run by the venerable Norwegian Computer Society, I'm convinced that there's quite a lot of new stuff going on, at least some of it not at all toy-like. There were new applications in municipal government (Stuttgart, DE), national government (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, Dutch Tax Administration, the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence, the Danish Royal Library, etc. These newer projects are added to older, well-established non-toy applications at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service ("Tax Map"), at the U.S. Department of Energy classification of nuclear weapons secrets, and elsewhere. Steve Pepper's closing keynote in Oslo was an illuminating wrap-up. Steve Newcomb 2006-04-03.

The Oslo event was the fourth "Emnekart" conference, and there is another, perhaps more research-oriented October annual conference in Leipzig, Topic Maps Research and Applications (TMRA). In addition, many participants in the August Extreme Markup Languages Conference in Montréal have been providing leadership to the field since 1994. Topic Maps have had a slow, quiet start, but there is every reason to believe that, if the Topic Maps paradigm hasn't already crossed the chasm, it is certainly more than halfway across, and it is moving toward ubiquity with increasing speed. Steve Newcomb 2006-04-03