By Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopia Technical
Report
Information Architecture is the discipline
dealing with the modern version of this problem: how to organize
web sites so that users actually can find what they are looking
for. Information architects have so far applied known and
well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and
now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for
information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps
compare with the traditional solutions. The paper argues that topic
maps go beyond the traditional solutions in the sense that it
provides a framework within which they can be represented as they
are, but also extended in ways which significantly improve
information retrieval. The paper tries to show that topic maps
provide a common reference model that can be used to explain how to
understand many common techniques from library science and
information architecture.
http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tm-vs-thesauri.html
See also (XML) Topic Maps:
http://xml.coverpages.org/topicMaps.html