| Contents | Author | City | Company | Country | State/Province | Term | Interchange |
The topic map for the XML 2001 Conference Proceedings has been built with Topic Map Loom, a toolkit designed and created by Michel Biezunski). Since 1996, this technology has been used to present a hyperlinked version of the proceedings for GCA conferences. An integrated version of GCA proceedings from 1996 to 2000 can be found on the Web, at http://www.infoloom.com/gcaconfs/WEB/index.htm.
Topic Map Loom is being used to build topic map prototypes that provide precise information both about the topic map model to use and the strategy for implementing topic maps in an organization. It can be seen as a starting point, a starter kit which provides a feedback which makes it much easier for decision makers to figure out what is the appropriate strategy to improve the connections between various pieces of information. Building topic maps can be a completely automated process if the information sources are already structured, or can be a combination of manual version automatic processing.
If you are trying to find answers to this kind of questions, send mail to Michel Biezunski.
The set of the source XML and graphic files for each conference paper, as typed by the authors and edited by the editors served as the starting point for this application.
This topic map has been designed to enable navigation based on keywords indicated by each author. In addition, navigation from a classical index, as well as special indices based on the geographical location of the author and the author company affilitation. The navigation model designed for this application enables easy-to-use navigation among companies, authors, cities and countries.
The topic map model designed for this application is fairly simple:
The following topic types are used:
The following associations relate topics:
Topic Map Loom™ enables building a set of linked HTML documents. The format of the HTML documents is controlled by Topic Map Loom’s XSLT style sheet interface that enables any kind of formatting.
The source XML documents provided by the authors, have been transformed into HTML so that they can be used with any web browser.
Using Topic Map Loom™, I have added upper and lower navigation bars to enable navigation to the table of contents and to the various specialized indices (by Author, by City, by Company, by Country, by State/Province, by Term). The navigation bar also provides access to the XTM version of the current topic map.
Topics are all hyperlinked. Clicking on any mention of each topic provides more information about the topic in a summary screen, a "topic screen". It is possible to go from an occurrence of any topic to another occurence of that topic. If there is more than one occurrence, the indication for the topic is surrounded by arrows. Clicking on the right arrow displays the "next" occurrence of the same topic, and clicking of the left arrow displays the "previous" occurrence of the same topic. This mechanism is equivalent to cross-referencing (i.e., to know more about the same subject, click here...)
Topic screens are individual web pages that summarize the navigation patterns for each topic in the map. A topic screen indicates the type of the topic, the related topics with the reason why they are related, and the various occurrences of the topics which are indicated either by the title of the file in which an occurrence is located, or by the neighborhood (beginning of the element in which the topic is related.)
This topic map was built by automatically extracting the content of XML elements that are regarded as topics.
| Author | Built automatically by concatenating the elements first name (fname) and last name (lname). |
| City | Built automatically by extracting the content of the element "city". |
| Company | Built automatically by extracting the content of the element "affil" |
| Country | Built automatically by extracting the content of the element "country" |
| State, Province | Built automatically by extracting the content of the element "stateorprovince" |
| Term | Built automatically by extracting the content of the element "keyword". |
The associations for this topic map have been built by automatically extracting from the content the appropriate, predefined associations: each author is associated with thethe employer company, the company with the city,etc. A city is either associated with a state or a province, when applicable, or directly with a country. If a state element or a province element is present, then it is associated with the country.
Topic Map Loom™ enables flexible customization of the resulting topic map, including:
Topic Map Loom™ can be configured to accept a variety of standard input formats. These formats include Ascii (Unicode), HTML (parsable or not), Microsoft Word, SGML (any DTD), XML (any DTD), or database format (exported). Documents conforming to these various formats can be merged and navigated as a single topic map.
Contact Michel Biezunski, Allen TX. Phone: +1 (469) 675-1000
| Contents | Author | City | Company | Country | State/Province | Term | Interchange |