When Federated Search Bites by Jeff Jonas is a bit of a rant but makes a number of telling points.
I think topic maps qualify as federated fetch to use Jonas’ terminology.
Not surprising since I think of topic maps as navigational overlays (where navigation includes subject sameness) and not as a data storage format.
But there is a lot of interest topic map software that stores data locally.
Both approaches work and have different advantages. Has anyone outlined how you would choose between those two approaches?