The TAO of Topic Maps finding the way in the age of infoglut
Steve Pepper, Larry S. Bonura · 2000
: Topic maps are a new ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources. As such they constitute 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 topic maps), 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 topic maps will be put in the future. 1 The TAO of Topic Maps 2000-04-11 1 1. Introduction Someone once said that "a book without an index is like a country without a map". However inte...