Opera and the TAO

For the historical record...

| * Murray Altheim
| 
| > But I doubt that Steve would argue that the Opera topic map is
| > anything more than a toy, a pedagogical and marketing tool.

Well, played with it for hours on end, so I guess it was a toy.

It also served Ontopia well for training, marketing -- and testing. And it might
have served as a good starting point if we'd ever been able to persuade Macmillan to
published the Grove Dictionary of Opera as a topic map.

On the other hand, people used to say to me: "If only it wasn't about opera!
Nobody's interested in that stuff! Can't you create a topic map about something
*useful*?" By which they usually meant weapons systems, financial transactions, or
some such.

My response was to say: "Why don't you do that? I've done my bit."

But nobody ever did. I wonder why? Does that tell us something about the community,
or about Topic Maps itself?

* Lars Heuer
| 
| No disagreement at all. But if I'd have the challenge to explain a
| novice the differences between Google Maps and Topic Maps I'd choose
| Steve's map.

That's very sweet of you, Lars! I feel quite touched :) All is forgiven.

| Topic Maps is about more than topics and occurrences. I don't like for
| different reasons the term "TAO" (that's another story) but it has been
| been invented for some good reason and it's better than TO. ;)

It originated by analogy with "The Tao of Physics" (well, "The Tao of Pooh", to be
honest). The Tao, of course, is The Way, and the paper was about Finding The Way in
the Age of Information. Just a play on words. T,A,O was just a play on initials --
and a mnemonic to help newbies get their heads around what I then regarded as the
key concepts.[1] It was never intended to be a program declaration for one among
several views of Topic Maps. I thought then that I was representing the consensus in
the whole community -- and I might have been, if the shit hadn't hit the fan in
January 2001.

If anyone is interested in how I would present the ideas today (or at least how I
did so a year or two ago), check out Pepper 2010.[2] I would like to see "The TAO of
Topic Maps" retired in favour of this article, written for the Encyclopedia of
Library and Information Sciences.

| > The WikiLeaks material is certainly in that realm, so those
| > manipulating that content should remember they're not playing with
| > toys.
| 
| ACK. But Topic Maps deserves a more advanced mapping.

+1 

Steve


[1] In 2000, along with *everyone else who ever spoke about Topic Maps*, ref.
various presentations in the late '90s by SRN and MB.

[2] Available at http://www.ontopedia.net/pepper/papers/ELIS-TopicMaps.pdf (if it's
not down, which I think it is at the moment -- Dmitry?)

TY - GEN
BT - Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Third Edition
PB - Taylor & Francis
AU - Pepper, Steve
TI - Topic Maps
SN - 978-0-8493-9712-7
PY - 2010
SP - 5247
EP - 5259
AB - Topic Maps is an international standard technology for describing knowledge
structures and using them to improve the findability of information. It is based on
a formal model that subsumes those of traditional finding aids such as indexes,
glossaries, and thesauri, and extends them to cater for the additional complexities
of digital information. Topic Maps is increasingly used in enterprise information
integration, knowledge management, e-learning, and digital libraries, and as the
foundation for Web-based information delivery solutions. This entry provides a
comprehensive treatment of the core concepts, as well as describing the background
and current status of the standard and its relationship to traditional knowledge
organization techniques.
UR - http://www.informaworld.com/10.1081/E-ELIS3-120044331
ER -