topic maps, former known as topic navigation maps and even before as sofabed. sofabed sounds good but it stands for: Standard Open Formal Architecture for Browsable Electronic Documents. this name was used by the davenport group (1992, founded by dale dougherty, o´reilly group). then it became part of the CApH activity and has been proposed as a new project for international standard and received it in January 2000 (ISO 13250).

it´s a HyTime-derived architecture (what is hytime about in few words).

charles goldfarb about the HyTime technical corrigendum