Topic Maps

Topic maps are a standardized (ISO 13250) way to store knowledge. This page contains a very short introduction to topic maps. A more comprehensive documentation is for example The TAO of Topic Maps. Wandora uses a slightly reduced version of the topic map standard.

Topics

The most important concept in the topic map paradigm is topics. Topics are entities you want to say something about. A topic can represent a person, an image, a web page, a company or more abstract things such as a group of people acting together, a significant event in the life of a person or the act of being something. Everything that you want to say something about must be a topic.

For example, you could say that Wandora is a knowledge management suite. For this we need a topic representing Wandora and another topic for knowledge management suite. After that we can associate the two two topics with an association.

Associations

Associations associate two or more topics. Continuing the previous example, we need to associate the topic Wandora and the topic knowledge management suite. We create an association between these two topics which we call players of the association.

The association also needs a type, otherwise we would only know that Wandora and knowledge management suite have something to do with eachother but we wouldn't know what the relation between the two is. We want to say that Wandora is a knowledge management suite. So the relation here is "is a". "is a" is also a topic and represents the act of something being something. This topic is used as the association type in our association.

There is one more thing we need to add in our association. Players of association do not have any order so we don't know if Wandora is a knowledge management suite or if knowledge management suite is Wandora. We need to add roles for the players. The role of Wandora is "instance" because it is an instance of the category "knowledge management suite". The role of knowledge management suite is "category". The roles are also topics in the topic map. A role and it's player(s) are together called a member of the association.

So the association actually has five different topics in it.

• The association type "is a"
• The role instance
• Wandora which is the player for the role instance
• The role category
• Knowledge management suite which is the player for the role category

Each association has exactly one association type and any number members. Each member has exactly one role and at least one player.