We present a solution developed at Aspen Publishers which uses Topic Maps [XTM], [ISOTM] technology for multidimensional indexing and classification of content across various products and publications. A topic map comprised of numerous merged indexes and classifications is used for navigation and, most importantly, content repurposing and building new and customized publications.

Aspen Publishers, an information provider for attorneys, business professionals and law students, has an unusual perspective—unlike most publishers its audience is equally receptive to both print and electronic products. Because Aspen publishes products across many subject lines, customers may want information contained in multiple products (e.g., tax issues are covered in such disparate areas as Pensions, Corporate Law and Insurance). As more of its titles move to XML, Aspen is looking to repurpose material in ways that make it more useful, more easily located or more readily navigated.

Because of the cross-disciplinary nature of many subjects, Aspen’s first look at “chapter-chunking” custom publishing was unsatisfactory. Chapters and sections listed in a Table of Contents provided a base of topics that was too wide. It needed a way for customers to combine smaller components of multiple publications to fit their needs more precisely. Working with Cogitech, a topic maps consultant, Aspen devised an approach that let the XML markup used for indexes become the basis for an index-based book builder.

In the browser-based utility that will be demonstrated, as with any custom publishing application, a library of books can be accessed and those books’ chapters, sections and subsections dragged and dropped into a column representing the book to be constructed. But, uniquely, all of the library’s book indexes can also be called up and individual entries added instead or as well. And, of course, the custom book that is created has a single, unified index.

The topic map approach combines all the indexes, tables of contents, glossaries and referenced materials from all books in the series into a single multidimensional index. Using topic map associations, the entries in one book’s index can be related to other entries, as well as to entries in the other books’ indexes, glossaries, tables of contents and so on, as well as to all external referenced materials, such as IRS publications or websites. This approach allows each index extry to point to the direct content in the book, which is displayed in the BookBuilder application so the user can explore all the associations any topic brings up. The demonstration will conclude with a discussion of the underlying topic-map technology and the use of XSLT to provide real-time creation of the HTML display.