XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web

This book is a must for anyone interested in Topic Maps. It would certainly pay to have some familiarity with XML, URIs, etc, because otherwise the examples will be hard going. If you do know XML, then you'll be away, because XTM is a very small and simple vocabulary. Each chapter is by a different author, and each one comes at the subject from a different angle. Topics covered include tutorials for using the XTM specification, topic maps for website Information Architecture, Knowledge Representation, Ontological Engineering, e-learning, visualisation, relationship to RDF, information about various software implementations (a bit dated now, but still valuable), as well as sample topic maps and XSLT code. Because of the diverse - even contradictory - viewpoints, the book as a whole provides an excellent overview of the field.

Since Tim Berners-Lee wrote of the Semantic Webseveral years ago, there has been speculation abouthow we might embed meaning within Web pages, asopposed to merely displaying content. To answer this,XML offers the separation of content from display.From its user definable tags, different usercommunities can define their own sets of tags andassociate meaning with those. XML offers theinfrastructure. But it is still fairly low level.Assembler language, as it were, compared to morepowerful languages like C or Java.So if XML is like an assembler, what is the analog ofC? This book puts forward XTM, XML Topic Maps, as theanswer. It consists of 17 chapters by differentauthors, outlining various aspects of XTM. Thechapters can be divided into two types. One type has nitty gritty explanations, replete withexamples of XTM written in XML. If you are aprogrammer, these chapters are for you. There are websites listed with XTM definitions that you canincorporate into your XTM, just like using standardnamespaces available on the web in normal XML.The other chapters deal with the much deeper andharder problem of how XTM may be used for KnowledgeOrganisation and Knowledge Representation. They arehigh level and abstruse, edging up to the issues ofsemiotics and artificial intelligence.As a side note: In the XTM examples andimplementations given, I was surprised to see nomention of altavista's graphical representation ofsearch results, circa 1998. This was not in XTM, butit conveyed the flavour. What happened was that if yousearched for, say, 'tornado', the results would appearas a graph. The nodes would be the main keywords inthe documents containing 'tornado'. Nodes would beconnected to each other if documents contained boththose words. In this case, one might see two nonintersecting clusters - one related to weatherpatterns, and the other to jet planes. By clicking ona node, you could expand it into finer grained graphs.It complements this book, whose main thrust is inmanually describing XML documents in an XTM format,because it could achieve much the same visual results,but derived automatically from arbitrary web pages.

In order to fully appreciate this book you will need a good working knowledge of XML and associated W3G documents, and more than a casual exposure to knowledge management. The first four chapters are a blend of historical information about XTM (XML topic maps) and fundamental technical information that describes design rationale and components of XTM (which is a separate open source initiative that is based on the ISO/IEC 13250 Topic Maps standard). Chapters 5, 6 and 7 dive into the mechanics of XTM and knowledge management, and requires the prerequisite knowledge I cited above. This part of the book is not an easy read. This is not a reflection of the authors/editors ability to write as much as it is of the nature of the material. Knowledge management and development issues are given both wide and deep treatment in these chapters. Chapters 8 and 9 go deeper into the XML family as they relate to XTM (with an emphasis on XSLT), and address creating and maintaining sites that use XTM/XSLT as the core of a knowledge management strategy.Related topics are covered in Chapters 10 through 13, including open source tools, RDF (widely used as a mechanism for weblogs and blogs that are gaining popularity), and semantic networks (intelligent agent-based systems). The final two chapters tie together the preceding material with a chapter devoted to topic map fundamentals for knowledge representation and a chapter about topic maps in knowledge organizations.If you are interested in using an XML-like technology as the foundation of a knowledge management strategy, or are interested in learning about new directions in the integration of web technologies and knowledge management this book is ideal. For the technical reader the code examples, pointers to open source and commercial solutions and the website that supports this book (using topic maps, of course), this book is an excellent way to leverage knowledge of XML and use it to develop knowledge management solutions.