I have listened to and tried to help refine marketing for topic maps. The one possible slogan is that topic maps make vendor X’s software suck less. Hardly a ringing endorsement of topic maps. 😉
There is the venerable “connecting the dots” theme, but I can connect dots with a pen and one of those puzzle books they sell at the airports. I don’t need a topic map to connect dots. Besides, I am the one who does the connecting of the dots, I just use a topic map to write my connecting of the dots down.
Maybe that is part of the answer.
Topic maps give us a way to write down our connecting of the dots. I can’t think of any search engine that allows you to store your connecting of any dots you find. True enough, applications like Talend help you write down your mapping of dots from one data source to another. But with one important difference from topic maps.
You can’t share your dots or their connections with others. Not and expect them to make sense to anyone else. It is the original topic map dilemma. No one knows what dots you have identified or connected and you don’t have any way to tell them.
With topic maps you can identify your dots, say how they are connected, and share them with others.
That sounds pretty close to being an elevator speech to me. Suggestions?
PS: I like the idea of connecting dots that can later be extended by others. Remember the original mapping European mapping expeditions in Africa or South America? They were all partial and all later extended by others. If that were to happen today, the argument would be how to best map the entire territory all at once. Which is doable, but only with omitting a lot of detail, such as meeting the actual residents.
Think of “exploring” one of the document archives that Jason Baron maintains at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and connecting a set of dots, that are later extended or perhaps merged with dots identified and connected by others. Eventually, with enough people connecting the dots, the “dark” areas become fewer and fewer. Not unlike what news reporters, lawyers and researchers do now, with the exception that the connected dots become useful to others. Collaborative discovery anyone?