Creating Your First Topic Map

Friday Oct. 5, 4:20
Edward Iglesias, Central Connecticut State University
Suellen Stringer-Hye, Vanderbilt University

We were commended to check out the Topic Maps LITA interest group also.

Edward and Suellen had an infectious enthusiasm for topic maps, and this session was super! They want to make progress together as a library community, creating and merging topic maps.

Topic maps are a way of describing knowledge structures and associating resources related to them.The topic map paradigm came about in old days of sgml people wanted to combine data with back of the book indexes. There’s a topic map standard: xtm standard derived from sgml.

A topic map consists of topics associations and occurances.Topic maps are graphs not lines of details.They showed several examples of topic maps, and then took the audience step by step through the creation of a topic map.

Examples of existing topic maps:

Australian Literature gateway
http://www.austlit.edu.au/

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A web2.0 social bookmarking site using the TMCore Topic Map
engine. The tags used to categorize bookmarks are topics within
a shared Topic Map and topics with associations are created by
the users.
o http://www.fuzzzy.com/

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New Zealand Electronic Text Centre

The website of the NZ Electronic Text Centre is driven by a topic
map.
o http://www.nzetc.org/