Topic maps are designed to deal with heterogeneous data. The question I have never heard asked (or answered) is: “Where does all this heterogeneous data come from?” Heterogeneous data is the topic of conversation in digital IT and pre-digital IT literature.
You would think that question would been asked and answered. I went out looking for it, since email is slow today. (Holy Saturday 2010)
If I can find a time when there wasn’t any heterogeneous data, then someone may have commented, “look, there’s heterogeneous data.” I could then track the cause forward. Sounds simple enough.
I have a number of specialized works on languages of the Ancient Near East but it turns out the Unicode standard has the information we need.
Chapter 14, Archaic Scripts has entries for both Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sumero-Akkadian. Both arose at about the same time, somewhere from the middle to the near the end of the fourth millennium BCE. That’s recorded heterogeneous data isn’t it?
For somewhere between 5,000 to 5,500 years we have had heterogeneous data. It appears to be universal, geographically speaking.
The source of heterogeneous data? That would be us. What we need is a solution that works with us and not against us. That would be topic maps.