[topicmapmail] About getting topic from documents

[Thomas B. Passin]

mmorillo@unab.edu.co wrote:
> I'm a little confused about creating topic maps, for example i have 20 
> documents i want to extract topics from them but i donīt understand how 
> to do this, what is the real method or process for getting topics, also i do 
> not have a lot of time for reading this documents isnīt there a tool for 
> making topic maps automatically?

Well, I hate to tell you, but there is no one "real" method for 
extracting topics (and don't forget about associations).  It would 
help,though, if you said more about what kind of documents you want to 
deal with.  Word Documents?  Poetry?  Web pages?  RDF graphs? 
Newspapers?  RSS?


> well once i have obtained the topics, do i have to make topic maps 
> manually? or there is a tool also for this 

The chances are you will have to write a too for this, but this may be 
easy to do once you can identify the topics - that would generally be 
that hard part.  You might be able to do it with an xslt stylesheet.

You should read Lars Marius's paper on turning a set of conference 
papers into topic maps - sorry, I don't have the reference right now. 
Lars Marius will supply it, I am sure.

> and finally what do i do with all 
> the topic maps i have made with all this process? Is there a way for 
> getting information from them or i just save them in a file xtm and forget 
> about them?? How do i implement the topic map document (xtm) in a 
> software aplication.

Well, presumably you have something in mind or you would not be thinking 
of creating a topic map.  So start from there.  Otherwise, the question 
is like asking "what should I do with the data once I get it into a 
relatoinal database?"  It can't be answered in and of itself.

Cheers,

Tom P