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One of the factors indicating the adoption of a concept into a discipline is its appearance in publications, conferences, international bodies’ plans and institutional projects. In the LIS literature and community, Topic Maps started to be a focus of interest around the year 2000, when it became an ISO standard. The Topic Maps community, on the other hand,

acknowledges its roots in the Information Science tradition and has been interested in finding the connections of Topic Maps to the LIS concepts and practices. These concerns and the practical experiences in applying Topic Maps in that field have been presented in conferences, blogs, and mailing lists.

Topic Maps has been discussed in journal articles of long tradition and importance in the LIS community, among others the Journal of Information Science (Garshol, 2008), the Journal of Library and Information Science (Peng & Ke, 2008), the Journal of The American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) (Yi, 2008), Information Research (Tramullas & Garrido, 2006), OCLC Systems & Services (Stringer-Hye, 2005) and Library Hi Tech (Iglesias & Stringer-Hye, 2008). It appeared for the first time in the Annual Review of Library and Information Science in its 2007 edition, as part of a section on ‘ontologies on the

Semantic Web’ (Cronin, 2007, p.430).

Besides, Topic Maps has been presented to the LIS community at conferences such as the International Symposium for Information Science (ISI), The European Library Automation Group (ELAG) conference, the International Association of Technological University Libraries (IATUL) conference, the Digital Library Federation Spring Forum, ECDL, the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML)

14 _{From here, all the Topic Maps-related concepts are italicised and the LIS and related terminology is used}

conference, and the Digital Resources for the Humanities (DRH) conference. The connections of Topic Maps with LIS have been introduced to the Topic Maps community at the

International Topic Maps Users Conferences in Oslo, various XML related conferences, Topic Maps Research and Applications (TMRA) in Leipzig, and The Australian World Wide Web Conference.

Topic Maps was also presented at the series of conferences ‘Luminary Lectures at Your Library’, organized by The Library of Congress (Newcomb and Biezunski, 2003), where the authors explained to librarians the main principles of Topic Maps as well as their experience in applying it to the “tax map”: master indexes to tax publications. Topic Maps was also introduced at LITA 2006 National Forum, where Steven Newcomb and Patrick Durusau, co- editors of the Topic Maps reference model, presented what Topic Maps is in relation to the vision of subject-centric computing (Newcomb, 2006). An interest group for Topic Maps originated from this forum, but it doesn’t seem to be currently active. A “Topic Maps awareness seminar” took place at the National Library of Australia in 2004 (Johannesen & Pearce, 2004).

Some institutions and organizations in the LIS community have considered Topic Maps for possible implementations and have conducted evaluations of its feasibility: The Aquifer initiative of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), whose purpose is to promote the effective use of distributed digital library content for teaching, learning, and research in the area of American culture and life15, conducted a survey to gather information about uses of digital collections in DLF libraries. In their 2006 report, Topic Maps was in a list of possible technologies that could solve the challenges in navigating digital collections and locating objects among them. OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) claims to use Topic Maps in two of its projects: “RDF Topicmaps”, which “explores subject navigation of Web sites using semi-automatically generated finding aids”16, and “The WordSmith Project”, which

developed a software for extracting concepts automatically and organizing them into subject hierarchies (Godby, C. J., Miller, E. & Reighart, R., 2001); however, these projects are based on RDF and not on Topic Maps. In their annual conference in Seoul, IFLA (the International Federation of Library Associations) included a paper on “The Living Memory” project (Leuenberger et al. 2006), an application of Topic Maps to the image domain. Finally, at the

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in the United States, Topic Maps was studied as one possibility for searching their archive collections (Le & Nguyen, 2007). The use of Topic Maps for e-government, education, information architecture of corporate sites and publishing in Norway is widespread both in private companies and in the public sector. In 2002, the first conference on Topic Maps in the world took place in Oslo, and it is also the country where most editorial companies have adopted Topic Maps (Vogt, as cited by Kongsbakk, 2004). The library sector in this country has shown an interest as well. The ABM-Utvikling (the Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority) funded a project where Topic Maps was used for the FRBRization of BIBSYS, one of the main national library catalogs, as part of the development of the Norwegian Digital Library Initiative (Kongsbakk, 2004, p.4; Aalberg, 2005). This project cooperated with OCLC.

Some national libraries such as The Royal Library in Denmark (Laursen, 2006), the National Library of Korea (Oh, 2007) and the National Library of Hungary (Tóth Máté, personal communication, April 19, 2009), The National Library of New Zealand (in what relates to the NZETC project) have also considered or applied Topic Maps in various ways. Some of the details will be explained later.

Finally, the placement of Topic Maps in LIS has been the exclusive topic of one mailing list: TopicMaps in LIS17 and a wiki project (Topic Maps for Libraries, 2006).

Concerning the relation between the discourses and communities, the Topic Maps and the LIS community, some authors have shown the need for interdisciplinary discussions on Topic Maps, which can act as a “catalyst” (Sigel, 2000, p.1) or as “a means of ‘bridging the gap’” (Pepper, as cited by Colmenero, 2005) for the integration of perspectives of different but related communities: LIS and Computer Science.

Adams (2002) insists that the library expertise in Information Organization (building taxonomies for instance), as well as that of computer scientists (developing ontologies), is needed to achieve the idea of the semantic Web (see 5.2.3); and further claims that Topic Maps is one of the technologies that could make this vision possible. In the same line, Stringer-Hye (2005), after the conference XML 2000, where the idea of the Semantic Web was presented by Tim Berners-Lee, advocates the need for participation from the library

community with their expertise in the construction of such a vision. Pharo (2004) also expresses his opinion about how the library community (specifically the Knowledge Organization area) should take Topic Maps as “an opportunity to implement well-known knowledge organisational principles and to try out principles that are less hierarchical” (p.11). Also Sigel (2003), by showing that KO and Topic Maps are complementary and overlap in many aspects, concludes that Topic Maps has an impact in both communities and calls for the observation of practices and research among them (p.384).