Jack Park, co-editor of XML Topic Maps likes to tell me: “topic maps are not news.” I respond with a variety of explanations/defenses.
Today I wrote the following:
Topic maps are a representation of what people have been doing for as long as they been able to communicate and had different ways to identify things they wanted to talk about.
Some people were able to recognize the same subjects were being identified differently, so they created a mental mapping of the different identifiers. When we reached the age of recorded information, that mental mapping enabled them to find information recorded under different identifications for the same subject.
Topic maps, like thesauri and indexes before them, enable people to write down their mappings. And say on what basis those mappings were done. The first act enables people to use mappings done by others, like thesauri and indexes. The second act, recording the reason for the mapping (subject identity), enables the re-use of a mapping.
So, no news. Saving time, money, resources, enabling auditability/transparency, preserving institutional memory, re-use of mappings (reliably), making more information available to more people, but alas, no news.