Steve Newcomb once described for me the first conversation where something recognizable as topic maps was discussed.
Government agencies were interested in not paying for duplicated or largely duplicated documentation.
Not hard to imagine that every time something changed on one of these:
You don’t want a duplicate of the original documentation, plus a page or two for the change. You want the page or two.
If you could also integrate the new page or two into your systems for the old, well, you get the idea.
Imagine my surprise to see:
Want to get rid of documents with duplicate content? by Don Pinto.
From the post:
Whether you’re combining data from two different data sources, have multiple purchases from the same customer or just entered the same data in a web form twice, it seems like everyone faces the problem of duplicate data at one point or the other.
In this blog post, we’ll look at using views in Couchbase Server 2.0 to find matching fields among documents and retain the non duplicate documents. For the sake of this example, assume each document has three common user specified fields – first_name, last_name, postal_code. Using the ruby client for Couchbase Server and the faker ruby gem, you can build a simple data generator to load some sample duplicate data into Couchbase. To use ruby as a programming language with Couchbase, you should download the Ruby SDK here.
Topic maps also address ambiguity, synonymy and collocation of data about a subject, but it’s interesting to see use case zero again.
Of course, fields aren’t sufficient for complex collation of documentation but it is the same general use case.
Perhaps government agencies will return to the quest for more robust documentation management in these budget conscious times.
Suggestions on texts to demonstrate such a use of topic maps?