The one article of faith shared by all topic map enthusiasts is: topic maps can express anything! But having said that, “when the rubber hits the road” (Americanism, means to become meaningful, action being taken) the question is how to build a topic map, particularly a multilingual one.
We are all familiar with the ability of topic maps to place a “scope” on a name so that its language can be indicated. But that is only one aspect of a what is expected of a modern multilingual system.
Fortunately, topic map fans don’t have to re-invent multilingual information retrieval techniques!
Bookmark and use the resources found at the Cross Language Evaluation Forum. CLEF is sponsored by TrebleCLEF, an activity of the European Commission.
CLEF has almost a decade of annual proceedings and both sites offer link collection to other multilingual resources. I am going to start mining those proceedings and other documents for suggestions and tips on constructing topic maps.
Suggestions, comments, tips, etc., that you have found useful would be appreciated.
(PS: I am sure all this is old hat to European topic map folks but realize there are, ahem, parts of the world where multilingualism isn’t valued. I suspect many of the same techniques will work for multiple identifications in single languages.)