Date: Oct. 27, 2000
Link: http://www.doctypes.org/xtm/home.html
Source Author or Organization: doctypes.org

Topic maps represent a new approach to solving the central problem of the WWW's infoglut: finding things. They can be used to answer queries of greater complexity than current web search engines, and could potentially revolutionize the ways in which we search and navigate through information.

The International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) Topic Maps standard, which is SGML and HyTime-based, is expected to become increasingly XML-based. As part of this effort, an XML grammar for Web-based Topic Maps called XML Topic Maps (XTM)is being developed.

Topic maps provide a standardized notation for representing information about the structure of resources and the relationships between them. A topic map defines a multidimensional topic space, in which the locations are topics. The structural information conveyed by topic maps includes groupings of addressable information objects around topics (occurrences), and relationships between topics (associations).