The assorted finds of Artefact Publishing
I have been doing a little work using XML Topic Maps to store information for use by a website. Although at this stage my topic map, derived from a few sources, is fairly simple, it could easily grow into a monster which will make using XPath to navigate through it horribly convoluted. And if you thought (and I know some of you do) XML was verbose, you haven’t seen anything: topic maps takes the inherent verbiage of XML and adds a layer of exponentially worse verbiage.
That isn’t particularly a criticism, by the way: it so far makes no difference to me how big the topic map file is, because it is automatically generated and there are much slower parts of the Apache Cocoon pipeline than that piece of it. And it’s neat stuff; indeed, the biggest annoyance with using a topic map is the desire to use it for the whole site (which would make sense, but is infeasible at the moment since the site goes live soon) rather than only a part of it.
I can easily see how one could become evangelical about the subject. Topic maps are one of those technologies that is is possible to advance as the solution to a whole host of problems without seeming utterly ridiculous. On the other hand, I’m not about to use them for any of my personal web sites, so I may be safe.
Posted by jamie on April 14, 2004 22:12+12:00
The topic map I am currently dealing with has topics for a set of poems, pieces of art and music and newspaper reports. It has associations linking works to each other, as well as linking metadata to a work. From this web pages are automatically generated which display, for example, all the information about a resource (a poem, say), including links to those other resources which are related to it.
The topic map itself is generated by a set of transformations of source XML documents.
In this usage, it is similar to a relational database.
Posted by: Jamie on April 15, 2004 18:35+12:00
We're thinking of using Topic Maps to basically Categorize all the content on quite a large amount of content in a website to provide altenrative navigation methods, that is 'all the content relating to subject x' in one place type pages.
(where the number of subjects is myriad, so you would only find a subject by typing in a related name in a search box).
Using topic maps allows us to present these pages with meaningful categorisation of the *type* of how all this content relates to the subject aka topic at hand... as opposed to a simple listing of content.
We are hoping for a nice attractive page on each topic.. We intend that end users could care less how it was done. So, like an RDBMS, but a bit more flexible and closer to the type of modeling that we need than something more fixed in a db.
Posted by: miles thompson on April 24, 2004 05:27+12:00
Erm.
Call me extremely dense, but how might one actually USE a topic map?
Posted by: stephen on April 15, 2004 14:21+12:00