Introduction to topic maps

"Topic Maps" is a relatively new technology that is likely to become very important in the future. A Topic Map is a document that contains a semantic overlay onto to one or more other documents. Specifically, it contains typed links to specific places or concepts in the target document. The semantics can be defined by the author of the Topic Map. Thus a Topic Map can function as a sort of index or hyper index. But it can be much more.

If the semantics are properly arranged, a processor can infer facts that are not explicitly contained in either the topic map or the target documents. A wide range of processing can be done to discover or link to concepts in the target document.

Topic maps, an SGML application, may be created in XML. Marked-up documents are natural targets, although other document types can be targets, including multimedia files. This paper provides a brief introduction to Topic Maps.