Re: [topicmaps-comment] Topic maps 'float above' resources?

[Robert Barta <rho@bigpond.net.au>]

On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 10:41:54AM +0000, Kal Ahmed wrote:
> At 09:23 19/12/2001 +0100, Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> >I would put this differently. Topic maps *are* connected to the
> >resources they describe (using links, as you correctly point out), but
> >in contrast with, say metadata tags, they live outside the resources.
> >This is really the key point: you don't need to change your documents
> >in order to describe them with topic maps.
> 
> And I would add that if you make more extensive use of topic map merging 
> than we see in many extant applications, it is possible to take this 
> conceptual division between "the map" and "the territory" one step further, 
> by creating a topic map of the subjects and the relationships between them 
> and a second map containing only the subjects and their occurrences, and 
> merging the two to produce a fully "connected" topic map,....

I here supervise students authoring topic maps covering mainly Internet-related
material. With these themes I push them pretty deep into technical areas.
My impression is that TM expressiveness scales quite well there.

Maybe we should slowly remove the 'map' and 'terrain' distinction from our
tutorials. It was pretty arbitrary in the first place, IMHO.

\rho