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

the paper steven newcomb and michel biezunski presented en barna: A Draft Reference Model for ISO 13250 Topic Maps

newcomb (audio/mpeg, 634 KB) 2002 at the xml-europe conference in barcelona.

information on oasis about topic maps: xml cover page

steve newcomb 1995 about ontologies: So "where's the beef -- er, I mean `content'?" I think it's all around us, in the form of ordinary documents, just waiting to be connected together and then to participate in some sort of emergent phenomenon. Now that HyTime gives us the ability to address it all (and therefore to make arbitrary links among all of its components and subcomponents), we can start experimenting with such things as handwritten domain-specific ontologies, and more automatic approaches using classifier systems and genetic algorithms that will operate in the realm of ideas.

about the roots of markup languages and <xml>.

listening to michel biezunski and steve newcomb. some of the things they said can already be read at xmlhack.

one thing to add: the reference model enables to merge diverse knowledge assets. steve newcomb mentioned his talk with a spy agency. there they brought the model in connection with the problem: different groups write osama differently: some with an o, some with an u. having these groups defined as topic map a and topic map b you can merge them to topic map c, to get all their information about this or another particular person in one big map. for me that feature maybe sounds like fun for control-freaks, but not for humanity and could lead to an even bigger mess.

it´s functioning because - and that is his explanation: whenever a node in topic map a has the same subject as a node in topic map b, all of the assertions made about both nodes in both topic maps are made about a single node in the resulting merged topic map c. if each of the original nodes had assertions connecting them both to any single subject-indicating resource (binding point), the merge can occur automatically, without human intervention.

(what he calles a node other call topic, vertices or vertexes)

more on topic maps