Is anyone else tracking what's happening in the field of topic maps? It seems to me that topic maps or something similar (like RDF) could address many of the issues that Glenn mentions in the Index and content browsing thread. (That thread is getting hard to follow, so I'm starting a new one.)
Some of the specific areas where I think topic maps can help are:
- Information types. Topic maps handle this with the notions of topic type and scope. Glenn mentions "dynamic conditional text" but personally, I want to manage this at the help topic level. It gets too messy trying to deal with this at the paragraph/sentence/phrase level.
- Merging. The notion of merging topic maps is very well thought out. In particular, you can prevent the merging of two keywords that are the same but have different scopes.
- Multiple named indexes. These would just be occurence types.
Of course, there's a lot more depth to topic maps than just this. I think that if OmniHelp used topic maps, or at least used something that could be easily converted back-and-forth to XTM, we could get a lot for free (or at least for cheap) as well as use any tools developed for topic maps in the future.
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Is anyone else tracking what's happening in the field of topic maps? It seems to me that topic maps or something similar (like RDF) could address many of the issues that Glenn mentions in the Index and content browsing thread. (That thread is getting hard to follow, so I'm starting a new one.)
There's a good introduction to topic maps at http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html. In a nutshell, topic maps are a generalization of ToCs, indexes, and glossaries.
Some of the specific areas where I think topic maps can help are:
- Information types. Topic maps handle this with the notions of topic type and scope. Glenn mentions "dynamic conditional text" but personally, I want to manage this at the help topic level. It gets too messy trying to deal with this at the paragraph/sentence/phrase level.
- Merging. The notion of merging topic maps is very well thought out. In particular, you can prevent the merging of two keywords that are the same but have different scopes.
- Multiple named indexes. These would just be occurence types.
Of course, there's a lot more depth to topic maps than just this. I think that if OmniHelp used topic maps, or at least used something that could be easily converted back-and-forth to XTM, we could get a lot for free (or at least for cheap) as well as use any tools developed for topic maps in the future.