Hypertext navigation aids have been created based on topics and associations that the designers believe will be useful to those trying to find their way through the bewildering galaxy of XML related Web standards.

We have used XSLT and HTML to create the navigation interface.  Here are a few of the highlights:

At the top / bottom of each page you will find a dynamic navigation bar.  From this bar you can link to the previous or following page of information (as organized in the Table of Contents).  You can also go back to the table of contents or to an index from the navigation bar.

If you go to the table of contents, you will see a listing of all the HTML source files for the map.  You can click on any one of these to go directly to that source file.

If you go to the Index, you will find several choices.  These are specific topic indexes based on topic type.  For example, all the illustrations can be found in an illustration index.  And all information about standards can be found in the standards index.

When you select an index you will find a list of topics of that type.  If you click on any topic you will go to what we call the "topic screen" that summarizes all information about that topic.  All knowledge associations are summarized on the topic screen.  And any mention of the topic is abstracted for you on this screen so you can know a bit about the context of the discussion before linking there.  If you want to go to the discussion of the topic, just click on the abstract and it will take you there!

Finally you will notice listings of topics with forward and back arrows above each paragraph.  These indicate that the topic is discussed in that paragraph.  The arrows can be used to navigate forward and backward in the knowledge base to other mentions of the same topic.  If no arrows are present, you know that this is the ONLY mention of that particular topic

While any one of the indices or the table of contents may seem to simply provide hierarchical navigation, Topic Maps have really enabled us to create a knowledge network, not a simple hierarchy.  In this map we have represented the network as a series of hierarchies, but have, in reality, formed a network of hierarchies, providing very sophisticated network navigation to enable the reader to navigate the continuum.