[topicmapmail] starting with topic maps: resources <-> topics relationship?

[Josema Alonso]

Hi, all.

Alert! I'm a newbie. Well, a topic maps newbie around here. I've been doing
web development for some years.
I even have browsed the archives of the mailing list and found some known
names from some Apache mailing lists like Xindice :-)

Well, let's get into it.

I've been designated the IA for a complex web site. It's a Spanish
university web site (http://web.uniovi.es). And I want to make something
very different and nice. I have just started researching Semantic Web and
found Topic Maps. And I'm very interested in them.

I'm pretty sure I would use topic maps but I have a big problem. We have
thousands of static HTML pages. We also have web designers who make some
dozens more everyday.

I'm thinking about building the IA for our site using Topic Maps. But I
can't add any of our HTML pages as resources or topics or whatever in there.
So I need a linking method from the HTML resources to the topics in the map.
I've been thinking about adding meta information to the HTML pages related
to one or more of the topics in the map. I would say adding a meta name
pointing to one topic id could be the way. Does it sound stupid?

I understand this is not absolutely semantic, but could be a first approach.
Our web designers will be developing pages as they already did for years, so
I can't make big changes in there. But forcing it to add a meta name for
example, could be possible. I'll think how to do it later.

Any ideas or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Please, forgive me if I'm asking something too loosy, but just tsarting
around here :-)

Best,
    Josema.