2. Is there a Topic Map standard?

3. How are Topic Maps Used?
"Topic navigation maps may assign properties to information objects for the following applications, among others:
Qualifying the content and/or data contained in information objects as topics to enable navigational tools like indexes, cross-references, or glossaries. Linking topics to enable navigation between them, which might result in virtual document assembly, thesaurus-like interfaces to corpora, knowledge bases, etc. Filtering an information set, to create views adapted to specific users or purposes."

4. What are concept maps?
"Concept maps are an important means of knowledge representation. People find concept maps intuitive and easy to understand, and they are also amenable to formalization to provide computational services. Concept maps have been used in many fields including education, management, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition, and linguistics."

"Concept maps are graphical representations used for organizing and communicating knowledge. In conjunction with computer mediated communication, concept maps can be used to support distributed collaboration workgroups on the Internet and the World Wide Web (the Web). However, the diversity of computer platforms conforming the Internet makes desirable the implementation of portable applications to avoid discriminating computer platforms or overworking on diverging versions for multiple operating systems. This paper describes the implementation of jKSImapper and jKSImapplet, which are portable Java concept mapping tools used as instruments for supporting workgroup collaboration on the Internet and the Web."

5. Is there a difference between topic maps and concept maps?
Yes. Topic maps refer to the ISO standard.

6. How can concept maps be used in education?
"Using concept maps in planning a curriculum or instruction on a specific topic helps to make the instruction "conceptually transparent" to students. Many students have difficulty identifying and constructing powerful concept and propositional frameworks, leading them to see science learning as a blur of myriad facts or equations to be memorized. If concept maps are used in planning instruction and students are required to construct concept maps as they are learning, previously unsuccessful students can become successful in making sense out of science and acquiring a feeling of control over the subject matter (Bascones & Novak, 1985; Novak, 1991; Novak, 1998)."

7. What are concept spaces?
"After closely examining previous research (both in information science and cognitive studies) and based on our own experience in creating domain-specific thesauri in several scientific, engineering, and business domains, we believe that creating robust and useful domain-specific thesauri (not universal thesauri) automatically requires a clear understanding of the following system development principles: logarithmic vocabulary growth, completeness, term specificity, asymmetric association, relevance feedback, vocabulary overlapping, and spreading activation. Many of these principles were developed based on human information processing theory [6] and our own information retrieval cognitive studies [8]. We refer to our approach to automatic thesaurus generation as a concept space approach because our goal is to create meaningful and understandable domain-specific concept spaces (networks of terms and weighted associations) which could represent the concepts (terms) and their associations for the underlying information spaces (i.e., documents in different domain-specific databases) and could assist in concept-based, cross-domain information retrieval."

8. What are mind maps?
"Mind maps can be used to represent the users' mental models." I couldn't find a really nice source I liked...except in printed books :-(

9. How do I create topic maps?
The articles that best describe this process are;

A bridge tool that seems to help one progressively move from concept maps to topic maps is Personal Brain (not my favorite) that you can download from The Brain or thoughtpad.

A tool for processing topic maps (acc. to ISO standard - free, python-based) is here http://www.infotek.no/~grove/software/tmproc/intro_tm.html

The simplest tool (no learning curve at all for creating concept maps is Inspiration. It's really only a drawing tool but has templates for concept maps that students can create (no rules, etc.). Inspiration is widely used in education and is available from Inspiration.

10. What does all this have to do with ADEPT, metadata, and collections?
The answer is actually questions to explore here. What are valid "topics" that can be abstracted from the metadata? Can topic maps be used to define virtually constructed (on-the fly, real-time) teaching/learning collections? How?

One goal for ADEPT is to develop ways in which digital resources and collectionscan be searched, organized, and presented in "concept-oriented" ways that are similar to the presentation of materials in a class lecture. While instructors have different learning styles, most agree on what the major concepts are and their relationships within a particular topic.

Consider also, if a Topic Map is an user-editable view of our information assets (or the information assets in a digital library), can we use the metadata to provide a topic map of our assets, and then allow the user to select based on their needs/choices?

Can we define an exemplar teaching/learning collection (an Iscape), as a topic map and then allow users to modify them at will?

How?

Other resources:

1. The TAO of Topic Maps - URL: http://www.gca.org/papers/xmleurope2000/papers/s11-01.html Viewed: 02/14/01
2. Towards Knowledge Organization with Topic Maps - URL: http://www.gca.org/papers/xmleurope2000/papers/s22-02.html Viewed: 02/14/01.