The TAO of Topic Maps
Topic maps are a new ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources. As such they constitute an enabling technology for knowledge management. Dubbed “the GPS of the information universe”, topic maps are also destined to provide powerful new ways of navigating large and interconnected corpora.
While it is possible to represent immensely complex structures using topic maps, the basic concepts of the model — Topics, Associations, and Occurrences (TAO) — are easily grasped. This paper provides a non-technical introduction to these and other concepts (the IFS and BUTS of topic maps), relating them to things that are familiar to all of us from the realms of publishing and information management, and attempting to convey some idea of the uses to which topic maps will be put in the future.[1]
The original version of this paper was published in June 2000 and thus predates the development of XTM (XML Topic Maps). The purpose of XTM was to adapt the topic map standard (ISO 13250) for use with XML and the Web. XTM provides an alternative, XML-based syntax for expressing topic maps and also clarifies certain concepts, especially those relating to subject identity.
