This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Meta Data and Topic Maps Feed Title: Michael Lucas-Smith Feed URL: http://www.michaellucassmith.com/site.atom Feed Description: Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Michael Lucas-Smith

Okay, the obvious question is about to pop up any second now. What does Metadata have to do with Topic maps?

Well, imagine you map out each kind of metadata as part of a metadata ontology, then you link a topic to the instances of those metadata values, say, categories, via your metadata ontology. You do this consistently for metadata's sake.

Now, you can use the topic maps querying interface to say "Give me everything in the system that has a category of BLAH" and it will instantly return you all things that have a 'category' relationship which links to the topic of BLAH.

Now, to take that further, say we want to distinguish between BLAH the metadata category and BLAH the word. We have a relationship between BLAH and the metadata ontology, so that when we want to do our search we do:

return me all things that have a 'category' of BLAH which has an 'instanceOf' of 'metadata ontology'. I hope you can see where I'm going with this.

That's the basics of metadata in topicmaps