[Sigia-l] Topic maps and IA

[Jonas H ö glund]

>The basic notion of creating a virtual abstraction layer to have
>disparate systems talk to each other indirectly has been around for many,
>many years.
>A lot of this stuff is old hat to folks who have been doing virtual
>file/storage systems, data mining, system integration through virtual APIs,
>etc.

I get your point, however, I like the idea of using a portable standard, such as TopicMap, for storing and sharing the relations between information within our organization.

This allows different areas within our organization to use and build whatever systems they might prefer, and still enabling them to share the information AND the knowledge of the meaning of the information.

We already have a company wide technical platform allowing us to share information between systems, using webservices and XML. TM and OWL, I think, could help us to interpret the meaning of the information in different systems, to combine and use it for various reasons

This seems to me be a solution that would allow us to be flexible and where our (virtual) information system could grow organically

/jonas