[Sigia-l] multi-faceted & topic map

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* hank99 at bway.net
|
| As a I was digging for ideas on execution, topic maps were thrown
| into the research mix. I'm left a little confused as to how they
| work with the classification structure. Are the two mutually
| exclusive? And if not, I'm not quite sure how they work together.

This is a bit like comparing a categorization system consisting of a
flat list of categories with a full-blown thesaurus. The thesaurus can
do flat lists, of course, but the whole point of it is that it gives
you a lot more.

So also with topic maps.

The idea there is that you are supposed to take the concepts discussed
in the information resources you are classifying and lift them up into
a semantic layer above the information. This layer is the topic map,
and in it you'll do things like adding types to the concepts
("Nigeria" is a "country"), their relationships with one another
("Nigeria" is "contained in" "Africa"), and also add whatever
properties to the concepts that you feel are of interest.

Finally, you take the information resources and connect them with the
concepts they are relevant to, and you specify *how* they are relevant
using something called "occurrence types". That's basically it.

The result is something much more than an ordinary categorization
system, but as Peter quite rightly points out, you can have an
ordinary classification system within your topic map should you want
to. A topic map can represent any structure; it's just most commonly
used to represent more explicit structures than simple classification
hierarchies. 

So while you might put "A Doll's House" as a subnode of "Henrik Ibsen"
in a categorization system in a topic map you'd say that Ibsen *wrote*
"A Doll's House", and you'd add that he was *born* in Skien, that he
*lived* in Oslo and several other places, and so on.

A very good introduction to topic maps is
  <URL: http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html >

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >