Topic maps revisited

By Lynda Rathbone

A few months ago I wrote about topic maps and how online classification techniques and technologies are enjoying significant uptake by organisations. In case you missed that article, topic maps are an open standard for capturing knowledge in the form of topics (people, places, projects, companies etc), the connections between these topics (associations) and the relationship these topics have to pieces of information, such as web pages, documents etc.

Topic maps can help you organise and find information over vast information corpuses as well as capturing the details and nuances of subtle knowledge models. From building richer information websites through to aggregating and providing access to disparate information resources, topic maps are a unique and powerful phenomenon.

The creation of top-level topic pages that are based on user behaviour is just brilliant. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you are a large grocery store. Your aisles and shelves are, in effect, your product classification taxonomy, which means you can now offer online shopping. As a user of such a service myself, I know you must learn how the store organises its products so you can find them. After about six months using the site, you can finally navigate reasonably well, but tend to rely on the search engine and on “your favourites” or “your usual” lists, so you end up ordering the same products every week because you have trouble finding other things. Do you know how many weeks in a row I’ve made a chicken stir-fry?

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Let’s think about a world where the aisles and shelves are left in tact AND top-level topics are introduced. You could have a topic page called “Kid’s Parties” or “Wedding Anniversaries”, with topic tags to aggregate all the products horizontally across the site.

This would give users additional navigation options without disrupting the taxonomy of the existing site, which is likely to be tied into back-end systems.

For further information on topic maps, visit www.networkedplanet.com. As always, any comments on this topic are gratefully received. Please drop me a note at lynda@foursquaremedia.net. n