Internet Topology – Massive and Amazing Graphs by Vincent Granville.
From the post:
I selected a few from this Google search. Which one is best? Re-usable in other contexts? What about videos showing growth over time, or more sophisticated graphs where link thickness represents “Internet highway” bandwidth or speed. And what about a video representing a simulated reflected DNS attack, rendering 10% of the Internet virtually dead, and showing how the attack spreads across the network?
Source: http://javiergs.com/?p=983 (a must read)
Be prepared to pump up the image size to get any recognizable text.
Truly impressive but I mention it to illustrate one of the practical problems in authoring topic maps.
The AT&:T graph is “massive and amazing” but it is finite. By its very nature it is finite.
Topic maps are finite as well, but their finiteness is by design. An entirely different problem.
In a topic map, every topic has the potential to have one or more associations with other topics, but it also has potential associations with subjects not yet represented by topics in the topic map.
That is like an encyclopedia author, you have to draw an arbitrary line around your topic map and say:
No associations with subjects not already in the map!
and,
No more new subjects in the map!
Which is quite different from a network typology, which no matter how vast, ends with with nodes at the end of each connection.
As a matter of design and authorship, you have to choose the limits on your topic map.
Where the limits of your topic map should be set will depend upon the use cases, requirements and resources that govern the authoring of your topic map.