2003 paper on reseach at HP on semantic blogging. Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! Making sense of it all Abstract To be faced with a document collection and not to be able to find the information you know exists somewhere within it is a problem as old as the existence of document collections.
Information Architecture is the discipline dealing with the modern version of this problem: how to organize web sites so that users actually can find what they are looking for. Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects.
What Are Topic Maps? Published on XML.com this if you're having trouble printing code examples What Are Topic MapsBy Lars Marius Garshol September 11, 2002 Many years ago, I started looking into SGML and XML as a way to make information more manageable and findable, which was something I had been working on for a long time.
It took me several years to discover that, although SGML and XML helped, they did not actually solve the problem. Later I discovered topic maps, and it seemed to me that here was the missing piece that would make it possible to really find what you were looking for. This article is about why I still think so.