XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

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.

So if XML is like an assembler, what is the analog of
C? This book puts forward XTM, XML Topic Maps, as the
answer. It consists of 17 chapters by different
authors, outlining various aspects of XTM. The
chapters can be divided into two types.

One type has nitty gritty explanations, replete with
examples of XTM written in XML. If you are a
programmer, these chapters are for you. There are web
sites listed with XTM definitions that you can

incorporate into your XTM, just like using standard
namespaces available on the web in normal XML.

The other chapters deal with the much deeper and
harder problem of how XTM may be used for Knowledge
Organisation and Knowledge Representation. They are
high level and abstruse, edging up to the issues of
semiotics and artificial intelligence.

As a side note: In the XTM examples and
implementations given, I was surprised to see no
mention of altavista's graphical representation of

search results, circa 1998. This was not in XTM, but
it conveyed the flavour. What happened was that if you
searched for, say, 'tornado', the results would appear
as a graph. The nodes would be the main keywords in
the documents containing 'tornado'. Nodes would be
connected to each other if documents contained both
those words. In this case, one might see two non
intersecting clusters - one related to weather
patterns, and the other to jet planes. By clicking on
a node, you could expand it into finer grained graphs.
It complements this book, whose main thrust is in
manually describing XML documents in an XTM format,
because it could achieve much the same visual results,
but derived automatically from arbitrary web pages.