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

[Thomas B. Passin]

Josema Alonso wrote:

> 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.

I am not sure what you mean by "can't add ..." .  It is very feasible to 
create a topic map that is a sort of overlay to a set of web pages, one 
that can provide navigation for them.  By this means you can completely 
change the navigation of the site without actually touching the pages.

One way is to create a topic for each page (its URI would be an 
occurrence of the topic).  Then you can relate these topics to the rest 
of your IA work by means of associations.

 > 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 think that, if the pages are created by some automation-assist, you 
could embed a little meta data in the data that defines a page for the 
build process.  That data could be used to automatically update the 
topic map when you rebuild the site.

Once you get the thing constructed, it should be easy to maintain it 
with little effort, as long as you can give the page developers some 
help in embedding the right meta data.

Cheers,

Tom P