[topicmapmail] Topic Maps and Libraries

[Conal Tuohy]

On Fri, 2007-05-11 at 11:46 -0500, Stringer-Hye, Suellen wrote:
> A colleague and I are writing an article about Topic Maps and 
> Libraries. We are interested in identifying Topic Mapping projects 
> that fit that context. If you know of or are involved in any 
> activities that you think we might be interested in, please let me 
> know.

Hi Suellen!

As Murray and Alex mentioned, the NZETC website www.nzetc.org is a topic
map web application in the "digital library" space. It displays
TEI-encoded books.

We chose to implement a TM infrastructure mainly in order to provide a
richly structured data model for the website. For instance, the ontology
deals with people, works (in an abstract sense), books, languages,
scripts, places, writing, publishing, quoting, citing, and a lot more.

>From a software-architectural perspective, using a TM as the data model
for the website provides a very useful degree of "layering", i.e.
separation into distinct tiers. The website's user interface is built on
the topic map, but the topic map is itself built (using XSLT) from XML
files of various types (mostly MADS + TEI). So we can change our XSLT,
enhance our ontology, and change our user interface without having to
make any change to our data storage tier at all. Or we can change our
data storage tier without having to change the UI at all. In particular,
we can easily add new data sources and map them onto our existing
ontology. 

Just recently we have started to use the site as a kind of "portal", by
harvesting metadata about other websites, and using the topic map
infrastructure to merge identical topics. The ability of topic maps to
automatically merge metadata records declaratively (i.e. on the basis
shared identifiers) makes this very easy.

For instance, see the page on the 19th century NZ author William
Swainson:

http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/name-209378.html

Note the links to two of Swainson's works on the "Early NZ Books"
website (which is from the University of Auckland).

To do this we harvested a bibliography from the ENZB website (in TEI
format) and transformed into into an XML topic map which contains topics
for William Swainson and for those two works. When we merge it into our
own topic map, the Swainson topic merges with our own Swainson topic.

Hope that's useful!

Regards

Con


-- 
Conal Tuohy <conal.tuohy at vuw.ac.nz>
NZETC