Meta-model technology: concepts and applications.   Table of contents   Indexes   Overview of XML Family of Standards
 Biezunski, Michel 
 France 
 Infoloom 
 Paris 
 		Michel Biezunski
 Principal
Infoloom
 1 boulevard du Temple Paris ()  France (75003)
Email: mb@infoloom.com Web site:www.infoloom.com
 Biography
 Michel Biezunski, Ph.D., is working as an independent consultant. He is actively involved in the creation of an information industry based on XML-related technologies. He serves as co-editor for the ISO/IEC 13250 standard, Topic Navigation Maps, and participates to international conferences on document management. He is creating a software application, Topic Map Loom, that serves to build and maintain Topic Maps, such as the one developed for the proceedings of this conference.
 Michel is a member of ISO JTC1/SC34, the committee responsible for SGML, Topic Navigation Maps, and related standards. He created and chaired the SGML Users' Group France until 1997.
 He worked at High Text, a company he has created in 1993, until 1998. He has created a curriculum for engineers on electronic publishing. His previous experience is in science publishing. His background is in philosophy and history of modern physics.
 France 
Frémy, Fabrice
 Paris 
Quid
 		Fabrice Frémy
 Project Manager
Quid
 211 rue de l'Université Paris ()  France (75007)
Email: ffremy@www.quid.fr Web site:www.quid.fr
 Biography
 Fabrice Fremy, 33 years old, is the project manager responsible for publishing Quid on-line, the producer of the most well known French yearly encyclopedia (400 000 copies sold per year).
 He created the Quid web site three years ago (www.quid.fr), containing Quidmonde and Quidfrance, two major web databases about France and the states of the world. He is also the co-author of the CD-ROM Quidmonde (400 000 copies released).
 He recently published Villes et villages de France on the site (an unheard of exhaustive description of the architectural heritage of the 34 560 cities and towns of France).
 He's currently working on the release of the whole corpus of Quid using XML and the Topic Maps standard.
 His background is in history, law and marketing.
 

Outline

 
  •  What is Quid ?
  •  What are Topic Maps?
  •  Why are Topic Maps useful for Quid?
  •  What has been done?
  •  Demo
 

What is Quid?

 Quid is a one-volume encyclopedia containing unique information and facts about various domains of knowledge, news, everyday life. It is updated every year, and is very famous in France. The circulation is around 400,000 copies each year. It is made of 2,000 pages, printed in small font-size (6 pt), and the index contains 120,000 entries. Its retail price (USD 30) makes it accessible to a wide audience. Quid's slogan is "A little bit of everything and a little more than everything". It is " a universal easy access database".
 

Quid online

 In a way, Quid has been since its first issue, in 1963, a synthesis of information and facts comparable to what Internet is today. Its readers were trying to find practically anything, from economic facts to sports records as well as a record of major earthquakes. Today, Quid is making its information accessible as a portal to the Web, which offers access to its information repository and links to the rest of the Web. Quid aims to be the priviledged portal to the Web, because it is providing access to its own information prior to the rest. It's not only a directory, it's also and before all a gigantic information repository.
 

Quid and XML

 The choice for XML appeared obvious for Quid. It is a requirement that the information be independent of any software vendor and be preserved from technological obsolescence over the years. The information assets owned by Quid exists since 36 years and are going to stay for a long time. They are constantly enriched and therefore need a permanent, standard format, in which they can be stored.
 

What are Topic Maps?

 Topic Maps is an international standard that facilitates navigation within corpora of information and are particularly well suited for representing the kind of navigation traditionally offered by indexes, cross-references, glossaries and thesauri. Topic Maps is an overlay that does not have to pollute the information, because it adds semantic by pointing to it rather to require that metadata be inserted right inside the information repository. The model has been around for several years and the ISO 13250 standard will be published this year. Technology has started to be developed to make it work. One of the first is Michel Biezunski's Topic Map Loom.
 

Why Quid needs Topic Maps?

 Quid needs Topic Maps in order to enable navigation of the 120,000 entries index. As a matter of fact, the index is the priviledged entry point to Quid, and it represents an enormous amount of accumulated intellectual work. Publishing an online version that would ignore the index would have been like hiding the richness and specificity of Quid. The other advantage of Topic Maps is that it greatly simplifies the XML implementation, because all tags need not be in the source information. Therefore the XML DTD used for representing the information at Quid practically mimics the typography and doesn't contain any semantic. The result was that the process of typesetting and maintaining this information is cheap, reliable, fast, and straighforward.
 

A gradual Topic Map Implementation

 Start simple, refine later. The first step is to provide an online version containing the whole encyclopedia. Navigation must be usable by anybody, without requiring any difficulty of learning or any complex process to master a sophisticated piece of software. For example, it should not be necessary to be a database engineer to be able to navigate the encyclopedia. Therefore, the first principle used has been: start simple. A first prototype containing a Topic Maps appealed at first sight to the editorial team, but was rejected soon after because it was judged too complex, and more adapted to researchers than to the general public. Topic Maps are great to build sophisticated models, but they can also be used profitably to build simple models. In the model built for Quid, the first step contains one generic topic type only: in other words, there is only one big index in which all entries are mixed. There is only one occurrence type: mention. In other words, every time a topic occurrence is found, it is simply considered a mention of the topic. At the time where this article was written, that were the choice designs. They might have evolved between that time (beginning of October) and the demo as it will be presented at the Conference. The main idea here is that Topic Maps can be implemented gradually, without to have to change the source information. This presentation will present the different steps that we have been going through in order to build the topic map that will be demoed.
Meta-model technology: concepts and applications.   Table of contents   Indexes   Overview of XML Family of Standards