[Sigia-l] Topic Maps integration

[Conal Tuohy]

G'day Klas. 

Have a look at this white paper from networkedplanet.com:
"Topic Maps in Web-site Architecture"
http://www.networkedplanet.com/download/tm-website-architecture.pdf
Particular the "navigation architecture" section, where it discusses the relationship between a TM and a CMS, in the sense of which is primary. It coins the phrases "TM on top" and "TM underneath" for two distinct (software architectural) models.

I have seen some interesting articles on using TM as part of iterative search interfaces. There was something 2 or 3 years ago I think at Extreme Markup Languages ... ah yes thank you Google:
http://www.mulberrytech.com/Extreme/Proceedings/html/2003/Freese01/EML2003Freese01.html

There's a lot you can do with topic maps ... I think in general TM are a fully generic standard for knowledge representation, though of course particular software implementations may be limited in how they allow you to use the map.

Another example is the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, where I work. 

We use a TM to model our digital library. It has some interesting features, such as that although mostly it is "TM on top", it also has some "TM underneath" features (yes our TM is underneath AND on top of our content :-) 

For example, see this page which shows a letter from John Cawte Beaglehole (a 20th Century NZ scholar). http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-JCB-001.html 

The page itself is a representation of a topic (called "tei-JCB-001") in the map. Note that the links in the sidebar are representations of some of the links from that topic to other topics, and the main content of the page (the text of the letter) is an "occurrence" (i.e. an associated resource) of the tei-JCB-001 topic. So this page is a "rendition" of a topic, including related content pulled in from a CMS. This is "TM on top".

Some of the associations we model in our map are: authorship, publication, mentions and depictions of things, and (just starting) "aboutness" links: where a text is about another text, person, etc.

Now hover over the hyperlink "Tasman" in the second paragraph, at http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-JCB-001.html#name-034630-1

You should see the link title is "Abel Tasman". This information was not present in the HTML "occurrence" (i.e. in the letter). It is added to the HTML content by looking up the HTML hyperlink in the topic map and finding a corresponding topic ("name-034630"). The name-034630 topic in the map has a name different to just "Tasman", so this information is added to the hyperlink title. This is a small example of "TM underneath", where content is primary, and drives extraction of data from the topic map.

If you click on the "Tasman" link, you'll see a page for Abel Tasman, which has been generated from the topic map. This shows links to all the places where Tasman is mentioned. This is "TM on top" again.

That letter has a simple structure, but most of the texts on our site are books, with more internal structure. Our topic map models the structure of the book (chapters, sections, etc), too, and we use this model to generate the table of contents on this page for example:
http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-GriBook.html

If you click on a link and read one of the sections, you'll notice the local nav at the top and bottom of the content "Previous", "Next", etc, which are generated from the same model, and which include the titles of the linked sections as hyperlink titles. The same topic map links are presented again as <LINK> elements in the HTML header, for browsers which present a UI for this kind of link.

There's a brief blurb about topic maps on the site, too, though it's an "executive summary" really:
http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-NZETC-About-technology-topicmap.html

HTH!

Cheers

Con

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Klas Thorsén [mailto:klas at doberman.se] 
> Sent: Thursday, 25 August 2005 01:21
> To: sigia-l at asis.org
> Subject: [Sigia-l] Topic Maps integration
> 
> Hi!
> 
> Time to bring up the lovely subject semantic naming and Topic 
> Maps again. I hope that many of you can add interesting 
> input, for example Alexander... :)
> 
> What I am looking for is a wide range of examples and ideas 
> of how to implement Topic Maps on web sites. When I look 
> around I almost only find the standard 'topic' headline with 
> related links that navigates the user to a search result 
> collection page with a wide range of subjects. What I hope to 
> find is if there is more interesting ways to use it. Like for 
> related content and other types of navigation implementation 
> and not just a gross list. Can Topic Maps add smarter value 
> for the user in other ways?
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Klas
> 
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