Topic maps: What to do with disconnected information
I’ve been busy writing a presentation on topic maps for a work sales conference in Melbourne. The timing is going to be tight as I’m presenting with three other consultants in a period of only 45 minutes. As I was writing, I was reminded of a message given to me at our recent corporate think-tank retreat:
Make sure you have your key message ready. If you run out of time it will allow you to sum up your whole presentation.
This is really good advice because even though I’m planning on only using 10 minutes, I think I’m bound to run out time. Deciding on what my key message is, though, has been a little difficult.
Steve Pepper of Ontopia, the nordic god of topic maps, recently made a comment on my blog about topic maps, acknowledging what I had said earlier about them:
“It’s a way of representing knowledge and information in the way that people (humans rather than machines) think about the knowledge and information inside their heads - that is, in terms of relationships, rather than a strict hierarchy or an unstructured cloud of tags.”
I think for the sales conference this is a good message, particularly since the key people present will be account managers who have to know how to sell the concept to prospective clients.
Steve also reminded me, though, that topic maps are an international standard, allowing topic maps to be shared, reused and merged with other systems. This is an important factor when the message is being communicated to the tech-heads afterward. I know there’ll be lots of schmoozing at this conference so I figured I need to arm myself with this message as well, plus a few more. Moreover, given the example I was using, I needed to answer the question “how can you bring two different world-views of disconnected information together?”
I went to the Ontopia website for some inspiration. They’ve recently released a PDF brochure called “Only Connect” and I think the messages inside will be great ammunition:
The more our computers are connected the more we realise how disconnected our information is
While metadata, taxonomies and ontologies are good, alone they only provide a fragmented view of information. Topic maps, however, can bring all of these disconnected views of information together
Topic maps go beyond traditional methods of information management. They connect different views of information by helping to manage the meaning behind information
Topic maps provide a way of articulating what information exists [in people's heads] and how it is related to other pieces of knowledge and information.
Topic maps can provide that point of connection for disconneted information.
So, I’ve put them into my presentation, armed my head with these answers in anticipation of the questions I’ll get once it comes to questin time. Let’s see what happens!
M
9 May, 2007 at 12:27 am
Topic Maps, Mind Mapping, Hierarchical Category Structure all have their place in managing information. It feels like we are on the verge of some major breakthrough in this subject. Until that breakthrough comes, we still have General Knowledge Base to store and organize information that is difficult to coordinate and categorize.
14 May, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Topic maps: What to do with disconnected information « Matt’s Musings
Matt writes: I’ve been busy writing a presentation on topic maps for a work sales conference in Melbourne. Here is a collection of key messages you can use to talk about topic maps.
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