The TAO of Topic Maps

»Steve Pepper, »Ontopia

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Abstract

Topic maps have figured very prominently at all recent IDEAlliance conferences, with a large number of interesting presentations on various aspects of the topic map paradigm. However, at every conference there are always many people who are encountering topic maps for the first time. For those people, experiencing that something they have never heard of before is the "buzz of the conference" can be very frustrating.

This presentation is designed to cater to the needs of such people by providing an introduction to the basic concepts of topic maps in a lively and informal manner. The presentation has been given many times before, and always to great acclaim. Most recently it served to demystify topic maps at Extreme Markup 2001 and XML 2001.

Keywords

»ISO 13250, »Italian Opera, »Topic Maps, »XTM.

1. Town Hall Meeting

Since this was a Town Hall meeting, it was not possible to prepare a paper for the proceedings.

Biography

»Steve Pepper

CEO

»Ontopia

»Oslo

»Norway

Email: pepper@ontopia.net

Web: http://www.ontopia.net

Steve Pepper is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ontopia, a company that provides topic map software, consulting, and training services.Steve represents Norway on JTC1/SC34, the ISO committee responsible for the development of SGML and related standards, and is convenor of WG3 (Information Association), whose responsibilities include the HyTime and Topic Map standards. He is the editor of the XML Topic Map specification (XTM) and the author of numerous papers and presentations on topic map-related subjects, including the well-known "TAO of Topic Maps".A frequent speaker at SGML, XML, and knowledge management events around the world, Steve was for many years the author and maintainer of the "Whirlwind Guide to SGML and XML tools". He also co-authored (with Charles Goldfarb and Chet Ensign) the "SGML Buyer's Guide" (Prentice-Hall, 1998).