ERIC – Education Resources Information Center offers free access to > 1.3 million bibliographic records on education related materials. Thousands of new records are added every month.
Education is communication and I can’t think of a better general category for topic maps than communication. There is no one size fits all subject identification and no one way to communicate with all users. Clever use of resources found through ERIC may help avoid old mistakes so that we can make new ones.
The thesaurus feature of ERIC is very topic map like. Entries are indexed under a set of uniform “descriptors” so you can locate records indexed by subject, regardless of the terminology the author may have used. I should say that topic maps are very thesaurus like to be completely accurate.
The ERIC data and thesaurus are freely available. Exploring the “triggers” that lead to assignment of “descriptors,” creating rules for merging “descriptors” with similar mechanisms in other data sets, or the advantages of associations would make good topic map research projects. Education is a current topic of public concern and dare I say funding?