Another aspect of the “oh woe is topic maps” discussion is the lack of interest in topic maps by geeks. There are open source topic map projects, presentations at geeky conferences, demos, etc., but no real geek swell for topic maps. But that same isn’t true for ontologies, RDF, description logic (ok, maybe less for DL), etc.
In retrospect, that isn’t all that surprising. Take a gander inside any of the software project categories at sourceforge.org. Any of those projects could benefit from more participation but every year sees more projects in the same categories and oft times covering the same capabilities.
Does any of that say to you: There is an answer and it has to be my answer? I won’t bother with collecting the stats for the lack of code reuse, another aspect of this issue. It is too well known to belabor.
Topic maps made the fatal mistake of saying answers are supplied by users and not developers. If you don’t think that was a mistake, take a look at any RDF vocabulary and tell me it was written by a typical user community. Almost without exception (I am sure there must be some somewhere), RDF vocabularies are written by experts and imposed on users. Hence their popularity, at least among experts anyway.
Topic map inverted the usual world view to say that since users are the source of the semantics in the texts they read, that we should start with their views. Imposing world views is always more popular than learning them, particularly among the geek community. They know what users should be doing and they damned well better do it.
Oh, the other mistake that topic maps made was to say there was more than one world view. Multiple world views that could be aligned together. The ontologists scotched that idea decades ago, although they haven’t been able to agree on the one world view that should be in place. I suppose there may be (small letters), multiple world views, but that is composed of the correct World View and numerous incorrect world views.
That would certainly be the position of US intelligence and diplomatic circles, who map into the correct World View all “incorrect world views,” which may account for their notable lack of successes over the last fifty or so years.
We should market topic maps to audiences who are interested in their own goals, not the goals of others, even geeks.
Goals from group to group. Some groups want to engage in disruptive behavior, other groups wish to prevent disruptive behavior, some want to advance research, still others want to be patent trolls.
Topic maps: Advance your goals with military grade IT. (How’s that for a new topic map slogan?)