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

May 9, 2010

Marketing by Example

Filed under: Marketing — Patrick Durusau @ 10:47 am

Marketing means effectively reaching the largest number of people, so:

Pick A Subject Of Interest To Numerous Others

Has the subject(s) of your topic map have been in the news for a week or more over the last year? Or within a particular domain of business or technical activity?

Pick A Widely Used Language

Internet World Users by Language: Top Ten Languages.

Top 30 Languages Spoken in the World by Native Speakers

Consider technology access plus number of speakers.

Use Imaginative Interfaces

Topic map interfaces should not scream I am a topic map!

Does your interface meet a user’s needs?

Marketing a Technology or a Solution?

Filed under: Marketing — Patrick Durusau @ 8:24 am

Inge Henriksen’s comment that topic maps need a “primary value or primary target” reminded me of the difference in marketing a technology versus a solution.

Marketing a technology involves creating a technology and telling customers: “Think what you could do!”

Marketing a solution involves meeting a need and telling customers: “Look what you can do!”

Compare the number of people using graph software versus using Facebook (rumored to be 400 million).

Both involve graphs, one as a technology, the other as a solution to a need.

Can you guess which one I would like to see as the future of topic maps?

May 7, 2010

Promoting Topic Maps

Filed under: Marketing — Patrick Durusau @ 8:31 pm

Thinking of the different audiences for promoting topic maps.

Here is my rough cut.

  • Experimenters People who like to explore new technologies. Hand authoring to experiment may appeal to them.
  • Hackers Computer types looking for serious data sets in topic maps.
  • Managers Meeting requirements is the only criteria. Cuddly world benefit, etc., see the marketing department.

I am sure I have overlooked distinctions within each group and entire groups.

I am equally certain that one approach will not work for all groups.

Suggestions welcome!

May 6, 2010

How Customers Think

Filed under: Marketing,Search Interface — Patrick Durusau @ 8:34 pm

Gerald Zaltman’s How Customers Think is a non-technical summary of psychological and neurological research on consumer behavior and how that can influence marketing.

Quality of the product is not what determines product success (or failure).

May 2, 2010

Topic Maps: A Value-Add Technology

Filed under: Data Integration,Heterogeneous Data,Marketing — Patrick Durusau @ 7:41 pm

It isn’t always clear that topic maps are a value-add, not a replacement technology.

Topic maps, by virtue of subject identity and mapping rules, can enhance existing information technologies and provide reliable interoperability between them. Without changing the underlying information technologies.

Topic maps are a value-add proposition because the structures of information technologies are subjects themselves. Database schemas and their fields, for instance, are subjects in the view of a topic map. Which means that users can map, seamlessly and reliably, between a relational database and a document archive, that use completely different terminology.

Or a subscriber to several financial reporting services, can create a topic map to filter and organize those reports. That is doable without a topic map, but what happens when another report service is added? What subjects were mapped together before? Topic maps are the value-add that can provide an answer to that question.

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