History of Topic Maps
History of Topic Maps
Topic Maps are still in a stage of development. They started life way back in
1991 in San Antonio, Texas where O'Reilly and associates were conducting
a session of the Davenport group and the topic that came up was of merging
indexes that were created and maintained separately. The group later
splintered, one segement going on to make the DocBook standard and the
other going on to make Topic Navigation Maps. The field was dormant for a
while, but then when XML came, Topic Maps were suddenly revitalized as XML
was the right medium for Topic Maps.
Over the last couple of years a number of commercial organizations have
taken a lead in developing software for the various life phases of a topic
map including creation, authoring, development, implementation, merging.
http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~aam/science/topicmaps/history.html