Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

July 31, 2010

Interface Suggestion for Topic Maps

Filed under: Interface Research/Design — Patrick Durusau @ 6:56 pm

New York Times stories have a feature that could be an interesting presentation option for topic maps.

I can highlight arbitrary text and a question icon appears above it. Select the icon and more information appears about the highlighted text.

I like it because:

  • it offers help, when I ask for it
  • it doesn’t require inline markup

Library use case: I am reading a journal article online and when I select the title of a reference, I should be able to see a link to that article and any related resources. (As opposed to being 3, maybe 4 screens away from the where I can see the cited article and then have to navigate back to the original article.)

As a user I won’t be exposed to topic/association/occurrence or proxies and legends. But if the point is to deliver the latest information across semantic barriers, that’s ok. Right?

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PS: The New York Times has had this feature for some time. I hadn’t seen it because I usually read the New York Times on the weekends and in hard copy.

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