The purpose of this research was to present a ‘state of the art’ of the placement of Topic Maps in Library and Information Science through an extensive literature review, creating at the same time a synthesis of their main concepts and approaches from a Knowledge and Information perspective, represented by Elaine Svenonius’ Theoretical Foundations of
Informaiton Organization and some of the concepts of Knowledge Orgnization. This thesis
intended also to present both a conceptual and a theoretical framework for future research. The qualitative study was undertaken with a Grounded Theory approach to concept analysis. One of the main elements of the research process was the creation of a conceptual framework, which served as the central point of reference for mapping terminologies and building
interpretations.
The literature reviewed consisted of more than sixty documents, which included, among others, journal articles, conference presentations and papers, student reports and thesis, and a book chapter. Besides, this was complemented with information obtained from mailing lists, blog postings and websites.
As observed in this literature, Topic Maps happens to be the trigger of many issues that are the current concern of the LIS community. However, not enough research was found
exploring how the standard has been incorporated into the concepts, models and practices of the LIS discipline. It showed, however, that the Knowledge Organization discipline is the main one in considering Topic Maps from a theoretical perspective, integrating it into the Information Science tradition. On the other hand, the Topic Maps literature claims that the Standard presents capabilities to be positioned at a higher level of abstraction and application than the traditional systems in Knowledge and Information Science.
The main principle upon which Topic Maps claims to differ from the bibliographic tradition is their ‘identity-based’ mechanisms (URI) as opposed to the ‘name-based’ mechanisms used in LIS for achieving identity and collocation. However, the principles behind these claims were not found to differ radically in their purposes. The basic difference is that their respective mechanisms belong to different “ages” of technology and respond to different needs given by
the context of the digital environments. Besides, since Topic Maps is at the level of abstract models, its openness regarding the specific vocabularies make possible the reuse and integration of representations that are at a lower level of abstraction, and that are based on “authority name” mappings.
This abstraction and its full adaptation to digital environments and the Web allows it to be considered as a model that builds on principles of ‘integration’, ‘cooperation’ and ‘sharing’ both on small and on a global scale throughout the Web. The URI identification mechanism of Topic Maps is what makes possible the representation, extension, but mainly the
integration of separate bibliographic systems such as thesauri, classification schemes, metadata schemes, and term lists. This capability facilitates the integration of documents, work languages, document languages and conceptual frameworks into a single mechanism where every element represented can become an access point, a point of connection with other elements and an “information resource” on its own.
This encyclopedia-like characteristic of Topic Maps, as a superimposed information layer over documents and their representations in the LIS realm, would make it appear as a very promising technology. However, there was no strong evidence that the LIS international bodies that dispose rules and standards are considering Topic Maps in their concerns or programs of bibliographic control.
On the other hand, various applications show that Topic Maps is suitable for the
representation of KOS, for integration of ILS through vocabularies, for FRBRization of library catalogs and, especially, in the field of digital libraries in the Digital Humanities for representing TEI-encoded texts.
The most representative experiences in those areas seem to be the prototype developed at the National Library of Korea for FRBRizing its MARC-based catalog, The creation of a digital library for the Finnish National Gallery, the metadata integration achieved at the folklore collection of the Department of Greek Literature at the University of Athens in Greece and the prototype for the integration of separate library systems through their vocabularies at the Danish National Library of Arts and Architecture are also promising developments.
However, the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) together with The Swinburn Project at Indiana University is the most consolidated application of Topic Maps found in this research. Both are in the field of Digital Humanities and have used Topic Maps together with TEI-encoded texts, for many different purposes. The projects are consolidated and mature, and seem to have guaranteed their sustainability and growing by showing positive results. Topic Maps seems to present significant advantages for these specific and semantically rich domains, since the elements can be carefully constructed and intellectually mapped.
Subject guides are reported as a promising area of small-scale applications, and the
integration of MLA as the most ambitious one. The latter one is considered possible through a topic map that addresses the metadata interoperability problem at different levels. The main obstacles for these applications to be implemented seem to be in the limitations of existing records, and in the implications of intellectual requirements of identification based on meaning, as in the MLA integration project.
From an LIS perspective, Topic Maps appears to be a development aligned within the tradition of Knowledge and Information Organization but completely adapted to the context of the Web and the digital environments, not as one of the traditional Knowledge
Organization Systems or its evolution, but as a bibliographic meta-language, able to not only to represent them, but to extend them and integrate them all.
This places Topic Maps on the borders of the LIS discipline with Knowledge Representation and Computer Science, where LIS conceptual models play the role of intermediaries by providing the ontologies to represent all the ‘knowledge representations’ of the bibliographic universe. As with any other technology, the human and intellectual effort is (still) needed. But the associativeness of the Topic Maps model seems to be closer to an associative way of thinking that documentalists and librarians (in different perspectives though) have had through the years.
Elaine Svenonius said that one of the central aims of her book was “to integrate the disparate disciplines of descriptive cataloguing, subject cataloguing, indexing and classification” (Svenonius, 2000, p. xi). She presented the intellectual foundations for such integration, but didn’t consider how this could be done in the context of the Web and digital information. Topic Maps, as a model, shows related interests. Besides, as a family of standards that are based on XML (the bibliographic syntax of the Web), implementation of this aim is possible.