I did not attend the main discussions about topic maps, but from what I heard, I wish I had. Topic maps appear to be a metadata effort akin to RDF that are, among other things, a simple and powerful way to represent indices and glossaries, as well as a solid foundation for powerful browsing and searching. They are a layering of associative information on top of a data set. Topics are connected to all related objects called occurrences , each of which has a role .
Topics have names and a specified scope , consisting of themes .
The quote below is from the topic maps tutorial. Topic Maps permit such index modeling information to be maintained separately from the materials that are indexed. Investing Internet Technology Windows Internet Tech. Copyright 2001 INT Media Group, Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.