Two of the four known challenges in the UK bioinformatics landscape could be addressed by topic maps:
- Data integration and management of omics data, enabling the use of “big data” across thematic areas and to facilitate data sharing;
- …
- Open innovation, or pre-competitive approaches in particular to data sharing and data standardisation
I say could be addressed by topic maps, I’m not sure what else you would use to address data integration issues, at least robustly. If you don’t mind paying to migrate data when terminology changes enough to impair your effectiveness, and continuing to pay for every future migration, I suppose that is one solution.
Given the choice, I suspect many people would like to exit the wheel of ETL.