Topic Maps-driven Websites are Different

Lars Helgeland Bouvet, Norway

Description

Today’s World Wide Web is the massively successful culmination of a long series of experiments with hypertext stretching back over many decades. Its prehistory is mapped out by Alex Wright in his recent book, Glut – Mastering Information Through the Ages. Under the heading The Web That Wasn’t Wright explores earlier, alternative approaches to what we now know as the Web and shows what a different experience users might have had if one of these had succeeded. Minor changes in the backend infrastructure or different functionality in browsers might have resulted in a radically different Web experience.

This presentation explores the same subject from the Topic Maps perspectives and looks at the idioms and patterns that Topic Maps encourages within the constraints of the current document-centric Web. It shows how certain usability patterns occur more naturally, or become easier to leverage, once content metadata is available in a topic map – and how this leads to a different way of thinking about information that in turn affects the design of web sites.

The focus will be on usability and the discussion will demonstrate visually a number of patterns for how rich content from a topic map can improve portal design, including

• Multiple paths to content to improve findability
• Improved fulltext search
• Faceted navigation and search
• Rich context availability
• Inline associations

None of these features require Topic Maps in and of themselves. However, the claim of this presentation is that they are easier to achieve when a Topic Maps-based information architecture is employed – and that such an architecture in no way hinders the use of other existing well known patterns.