Topic Maps in the Encyclopedia of Law

A topic map is a set of topics and associations between them. The set drives navigational and analytical tools. Thus, topic maps may be seen as a generalized way of implementing indexes, glossaries, thesauri, taxonomies, ontologies, and other systems of creating, collecting, curating, and navigating topics and associations that are of interest to communities of users.

Topic Maps are the ideal supporting technology for web portals, providing a conceptual
and technical framework for navigation, search, classification, and interaction
design.

Users are able to move around the resources on the site tracking topics of interest rather than merely browsing the material linearly or through text searching. In a topic map, web-based resources are grouped around items called “topics”, each of which represents some subject of interest.

Topics in a topic map are linked together with hyperlinks called “associations”. There can be different types of association in a topic map, representing the different kinds of relationship in the real world. For instance, in the Encyclopedia topic map, the topic which represents a particular person may be linked to a topic which represents a chapter of a book which mentions that person. This association is labelled to indicate that it represents a “mention”.

Application areas can be found where there is rich, highly granular content whose relationships cannot be adequately represented or navigated with fielded data or “tags”: document dumps, large corpora, legal blogs, litigation services, etc.

The Underlying Topic Map

The Encyclopedia Topic Map is a web presentation of an underlying “topic map”, best understood as a kind of subject-oriented database – a database designed to organize information around subjects of interest to taxpayers. Each subject has a “topic page”in the Topic Map. This page provides central access to everything that the Topic Map knows about the subject. It may have links to the topic pages of related topics, as well as to relevant forms, instructions, and publications.

The Topic Map production process adapts to the different kinds of information produced by the various groups at the Encyclopedia, and incorporates input and feedback from professionals and users. Adherence to the principles of the ISO Topic Maps standard protects the value of this knowledge, allowing it to be exploited and maintained under changing conditions.

Features

  • Topic Map enables research by subject
  • Navigate to subject by search or bybrowsing.
  • Information available about subjects is grouped in a single place.
  • Subjects can have diverse names.
  • Topic Maps standard: a first step towards semantic integration.
  • Topics and Associations result from combination of automatic processing and manual work.

For more information on the Topic Maps international standard see Cover Pages hosted by OASIS and the ISO working group maintaining the standard.

Further Reading

  • Automated Knowledge Mining. White Paper available at https://www.isogen.com/downloads/index.htm
  • Garshol, L.M (2004): Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!
    https://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tm-vs-thesauri.html

  • OpenCyc, the open source version of Cyc(r) technology. Information available at https://www.opencyc.org/
  • Document Object Model (DOM)Level 2 Core Specification Version 1.0. https://www.w3.org/TR/DOMLevel-2Core/ .
  • Java programming language. An interpreted language. https://java.sun.com/
  • ISO 8879:1986, Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Published by International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Not available online.
  • Topic Maps for Java https://www.tm4j.org/
  • Unified Modeling Language (UML) https://www.omg.org/uml/
  • Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Second Edition). https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml
  • XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0. https://www.w3.org/TR/xpath.
  • XPointer Framework W3C Working Draft 10 July 2002 https://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-framework.
  • XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0, https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt
  • XML Topic Maps (XTM) Version 1.0, https://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/

Conclusion

Notes

See Also

References and Further Reading

About the Author/s and Reviewer/s

Author: international

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Linked Data Principles to Legal Information.


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