XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web

Of course, I had to coach her on how to type in a sentence: a living thing had to be represented as
either a livingthing or a living_thing in my program. XML topic maps take us beyond all that. Her
concept map, cast as an XTM document, contains several topics (the bubbles) and several associations
(the arrows).
As maps or as representations of what we think we know, topic maps are just views into microworlds
of knowledge.
Figure 1-1
represents the view of a seven-year-old child. Consider the issue of view
construction. A topic map, when built using the XTM specification, is just an XML document,
meaning that it is a document comprised of a bunch of named tags, like
<topic>
or
<association>
, and the data that fills in the space between tags. Here is the XTM document made
from the diagram created by Nefer's sentences. The construction of this document is illustrated in the
discussion of Nexist, my open source software project in
Chapter 10
.