[topicmaps-comment] Introduction

[Judith Silvasi-Patchin <jspatchi@qualcomm.com>]

Hi,
I am currently a project manager charged with investigating and 
recommending a content management system for my company.
My background includes BS in Management Information Systems, MS in 
Management and Policy, emphasis in Organizational Behavior,  Training and 
Development, and some software engineering. I started working more with 
technical documentation because I was disgusted with the poor quality of 
documentation available to me when trying to learn new software.
My first project was to write user documentation using the source code and 
the finished product.
  I recognized early on that content is similar to source code and that the 
development process is quite similar. So when the software world switched 
to the object oriented paradigm I could see how well documentation could 
use that same paradigm.  So we have information objects instead of source 
code modules.

While there are enough differences between software and document 
development so that source code configuration management  systems would not 
work for content management, there were not a lot of content management 
system available either.
I see Topic Mapping as a methodology for identifying the patterns within a 
set of documents that will lead to the logical reusable components.

All that said, I am very interested in being a part of this group and hope 
to be a contributor.
Judy Silvasi-Patchin
QUALCOMM, Inc
858 651 7449