Topic Maps, The Business Case

Quid - Encyclopedia Navigation With Topic Maps

The on-line version of the Quid Encyclopedia makes use of topic maps to provide internal navigation between articles. The topics occurrences and associations of the topic map are generated automatically from the index of the sources. In the published form of the web-site, each article is followed by a list of links to the subjects mentioned in the article. The subjects themselves are represented as separate pages which serve as the hub from which the user can then navigate to any one of the articles in the encyclopedia which are related to that subject. In this way, it is possible for the user to intuitively browse the encyclopedia contents, going from one article to another, related article with just two clicks. One of the most important aspects of this application of topic maps is that the user is completely unaware of the technical implementation of the index - the fact that they are traversing from occurrences to topics and then to other occurrences is completely hidden - they are simply seeing articles and subjects.

For Quid, the main business driver behind the implementation was the desire to get their index information on to the web. The rationale for choosing topic maps as the technology for representing their index was that the XML structure of topic maps was sufficiently simple for it to be easily generated from their existing index information.

Michel Biezunski of Infoloom, sees the advantage of topic maps as being two fold. Firstly, the flexibility of topic maps gives his customers more freedom to define the model that best fits their needs. He comments that in every project he has worked on, "People were able to describe the structure of the information they wanted, however complex it looked at first glance". Additionally, customers see the benefit in using a standard to describe this information structure, just as SGML and XML can be used to preserve the investment made in the data (by freeing it from proprietary document formats), so topic maps can be applied to describe the information structure in an open format portable across different vendor offerings - thus better preserving any investment made in developing and refining that structure.

Cogitech - Topic Maps And XSLT

Cogitech specialize in the production of low-cost intranet and internet web-sites using a combination of XML technologies in which topic maps are used extensively to create the structure of the web-site. As with the Quid web-site, the web pages are generated from topics in the web-site's topic map. However on the Cogitech web-site ( ), not only is each page represented by a topic in the topic map, but the pages themselves are constructed by traversing associations from the 'page' topic to other topics, each of which become an item on the page. Another difference here is the use of XSLT to transform the structural information in the topic map into navigable links in the published web-site. Topic maps were chosen by the site's designer and implementer, Nikita Ogievetsky, because of the ability to not only represent the web-site as a non-directed network of display elements but also to encode style and behaviour information within the same information structure. Additionally, he found that the XML interchange syntax for topic maps to be sufficiently simple to be readily handled with XSLT.

In addition to using XSLT to generate web-site content from topic maps, Nikita has also developed reusable style-sheets for harvesting topic map information from other meta data forms. The use of XSLT for producing the hyper-linked pages reduces the cost of production by enabling the use of free tools.

Before applying topic maps to this problem, Nikita investigated the use of XLink but found that it was not sufficiently expressive to represent the styling and behavioural aspects of the site. He also found the RDF and RDF Schema caused different problems - although both are sufficiently expressive, each different site organisation would require a different RDF schema with a different set of elements - thus requiring more custom XSLT code.

ITU

The Network for IT Research and Competence in Education (ITU) is a part of the Faculty of Education at the University of Oslo which is funded by the Norwegian government with the goal of promoting the application of information technology at all levels of education, from primary school through to teacher training. The remit of the organisation is to act as a coordinator for many different and diverse projects which bring more information technology into education. The ITU web-site, designed and implemented by the Scandanavian consultancy Creuna, presents information about the projects and about the people, and organizations involved in those projects as well as maintaining abstracts of and links to various publications produced by those people and organizations.

The collective information of the ITU web-site is stored in an object-oriented database and accessed using the Zope web-publishing system. Creuna cooperated with Ontopia to develop a toolkit called ZTM. ZTM consists of a database schema for Zope which allows topic map objects to be persistently stored in the Zope database, and a Python interface and Zope web-publishing system integration which enables those topic map objects to be included in dynamically generated web pages just like any other object in the Zope system. This toolkit is being donated to the Open Source community by Creuna and Ontopia (as openZTM), who will also continue to sponsor further collaborative development of it.

The ITU web application was then developed around a combination of the Zope Content Management Framework (CMF) and a topic map schema which represents the relationships between projects, organisations, people and publications. On the web-site itself, nearly every page is dynamically generated from a topic in the ZTM database. The page display consists mainly of topic characteristics such as names, occurrences and association roles. The occurrence role and association role types are used to name the headings on the page. For example, from a page describing an individual, links are presented titled "Works for", "Project leader for", "Author of" and so on - these links are not taken from fixed fields in the database but are found by traversing the associations from the topic and using the information about each association to derive the correct title for the link. This means that if at a later date new links are required between the Person topic and some other topics, they can be simply added to the database while the application code itself remains unchanged.

Also of interest on the ITU site is the alternative means of navigating between topics - the topics are displayed in the upper-right hand corner as text of differing sizes "floating" in a rectangle, implemented using Macromedia Flash. The text displayed is the names of the set of topics "most closely linked" to the topic displayed on the page - the system uses a mechanism of weighted traversal of associations to determine the topics to be displayed. Mousing over a text string displays the type of the topic (so it is possible to distinguish between a document name and a project name, for example).

Stian Danenbarger of Creuna notes that although ITU was the first site developed with the ZTM framework, their initial investment is quickly paying off - "Being our first Zope project, and our first Topic Map project, we still delivered on time and on budget. The customer can maintain and rearrange content, information structure and template layout through the web. The customer is very satisfied.". A second topic-map-driven web-site is due to go live in November 2001, with a third, more complex site in the pipeline. In fact, the existing topic map framework meant that, once the design and static HTML was done the second site was built in just one and a half days. Danenbarger attributes part of this reduced delivery time to the conceptual element of topic maps - "We couldn't come up with a better concept in the couple of weeks we could spend on analysis and design.", he says.

When discussing the problems of adopting a new technology such as topic maps, Danenbarger comments that the relatively immature state of the existing tools is still a hurdle to overcome, as is the lack of "best practices" on topic map design. However, by developing their web-site development framework on an open, standards-based technology, Creuna also hope to benefit from synergy with future topic map tools; competence; and from being able to interchange web-site information easily.

Bravo - Knowledge Management with Topic Maps

Bravo, developed by GlobalWisdom Inc. is a knowledge management tool which combines both explicit and automated categorization of documents with user-feedback to determine the relevance of documents to any given query. The operation of Bravo is more complex than an automated categorisation of documents, as the system learns what documents are relevant to a particular query by both explicit feedback from the users (where a user rates a result for its relevance) and by implicit feedback (where the system determines the document's relevance to the user's query based upon what actions they do or do not perform on the document). Additionally the Bravo system enables individual users to be recognised as experts in particular subject areas and for other users to modify their results sets to promote the documents that the 'expert' claims to be most relevant. What is different in Bravo is that this expert may never have explicitly marked documents as relevant, instead the user is filtering the result set according to the expert's profile, which, in turn, is built through the expert's interactions with the software. This would include many documents that the expert may never have seen, but that Bravo has, using the profile, identified as relevant.

The information about documents; the concepts related to the documents; the 'experts' in the different conceptual areas; and the relationship between concepts are all stored by Bravo using a topic map. Bryan Thompson, CEO of GlobalWisdom, says "We use a topic map engine to provide a sophisticated and scalable information architecture. This serves as a differentiator for us and helps us to address more upscale markets.". GlobalWisdom chose not to implement their own topic map engine but instead to make use of the K42 engine from Empolis. "You could consider us a value-add for a topic map engine, and visa-versa" comments Thompson. Naturally, other means of representing the information structures required by Bravo are available and were considered - including directory servers and database systems, but topic maps were chosen because of the richness of the basic information architecture that they provide.

For GlobalWisdom, using topic maps as their underlying architecture and choosing to use a third-party engine has enabled them to bring a complex, scalable solution for to market more rapidly than they would otherwise have been able to. For customers of GlobalWisdom, although they need never be aware of the topic map technology that hides beneath the Bravo application, the topic or concept-centric organisation provides faster, more accurate access to relevant information, reducing the amount of time that people need to spend searching for the information that enables them to do their work.

Starbase

Starbase Corporation is a leading provider of collaboration solutions for business application management. Starbase offers a family of user-friendly software products that enable teams of people to collaborate in the development and management of Web sites, e-commerce and business critical applications. The flagship product of Starbase, is the StarTeam repository which provides source code control, defect tracking, change management and task management and workflow functionality. Starbase is using topic map technology as a central element in a new product architecture which focuses on extracting value from information. As a repository, Starbase's software can hold a huge amount of information - some customers have StarTeam repositories in excess of 30GB for a single server. Exponential growth in hardware capabilities, such as processing power, storage capacity, and network connectivity, will offer still greater capacity to create information. All of this available information is described by Starbase as an "Information Tsunami".

Starbase's new information architecture creates a unified view into a "technical collaboration space", providing access to all information resources, regardless of the product and project repository where they physically reside, be it a StarTeam repository, CaliberRM (a web-based system for managing project requirement information), Microsoft Exchange, custom information systems, and so on. The technical implementation is based upon topic map technology delivered by Ontopia. Within the system architecture, topic map technology is used as a core infrastructure technology to enable collaboration between diverse information systems. The use of topic maps enables Starbase to develop functionality such as:

• finding information based on semantic queries

• guiding traditional text search engines

• providing intuitive navigation of information spaces

• providing a framework for "knowledge events"

For Starbase, the choice to use topic map technology was made after careful evaluation of many different technologies and standards. Their decision was influenced by a number of factors. Most importantly, topic maps are a standards-based technology making use of XML, this providing advantages in interoperability and the ability to leverage existing implementations. In addition, Starbase believes that the flexibility and simplicity of the topic map architecture permits applicability of this technology far beyond its original design objectives - thus ensuring its status as a long-lived technology.

Of course, being on the "bleeding edge" created challenges getting corporate buy-in - especially as topic maps, being a new technology, has yet to provide many demonstrable cases of significant business value being derived from its application. The team responsible for developing the new system architecture worked hard to produce a proof-of-concept system in order to demonstrate value to their management.

Being a supplier of mission-critical software development support systems, the primary aim of Starbase is to deliver benefits to their customers in the form of more efficient knowledge-working. The new, topic map based, information architecture should provide their customers with a return on investment right away, as users benefit from being able to find existing information with much less effort than is required today. The topic map system also provides a framework for supporting "knowledge event" detection, which allows relevant information to be delivered to users without requiring an explicit search. Future developments will further integrate other development tools, allowing these tools to make better use of the domain knowledge held in the system. Although the primary objective of this approach is to increase the personal and team efficiency for software development processes, the number of dependencies between those individuals and teams and the rest of the organization means that the benefits will spill over into many parts of the enterprise.