“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.”
“Those who don?t take care over their metadata are shoeless, doorless and clueless. Content is expensive to create. Without quality metadata it is missing a vital ingredient that will make it effective on the Web. Without quality metadata the chances of it being found and read by the person who wants to read it are significantly diminished. Answer me this one: Just what good is your content if the people who need to read it can?t find it?”
and don’t forget to reread metacrap before you go getting all gushy on metadata.
[ The TAO of Topic Maps via aaron | Why metadata is important via iaslash ]