practical.htm

I nfoLoom, Inc. is offering a unique introduction to topic maps
We'll be demonstrating topic map software; you will be amazed to see how easy it is to use

Why You Should Care

The more online information we have available to us, the more difficult it is to find what we're looking for, even if we know it's somewhere on our own hard disk. On the World Wide Web, the situation is even worse: keyword and full-text searches often return an impracticably large number of hits, and, even so, important resources are overlooked because data, rather than information, is what is being searched.

"Topic Maps" is an emerging information technology that provides a standard, interchangeable navigation layer above diverse information sources. Topic Maps enable us to organize and retrieve information maps for the Web, our Intranets, etc. -- even print materials.

Topic Maps enable their users to retain the value of their indexes, catalogs, thesauri, etc. even when they replace or upgrade their computer systems; Topic Maps are interchangeable. For their owners, Topic Maps are highly exploitable assets. Investments made in creating and maintaining topic maps can pay significant dividends when they are easily reused, merged with other topic maps, etc., independently of the software used to produce and maintain them. This opens huge business opportunities for anyone who owns, maintains, or uses (or who needs to own, maintain, or use) almost any kind of information finding aid, for almost any corpus of information.

What You will Learn

In the Practical Topic Map Workshop you will learn:

Finally, you will see how topic maps integrate with the ontologies, vocabularies, thesauri, and classification schemas used by various communities (including yours). You will learn how the XTM specification tailors topic maps to fit the World Wide Web environment.