Tags / 15 quotes from 3 sources
#topic
Networks Of Scientific Papers
Two bibliographic needs for scientists: alerting service & taxonomic
From these two different types of connections it appears that the cita-tion network shows the existence of two different literature practices and of two different needs on the part of the scientist. (i) The research front builds on recent work, and the network be-comes very…
Storyspace Website, Eastgate Systems
Notes organization: eg storyspace
For my work, the main advantage of this system comes when I wish to write a report. When I have enough data to provide a fairly complete description of a particular topic or event, I use the Storyspace "gather" feature and the "path builder" to collect all the writing spaces…
The Tao Of Topic Maps
What counts as a topic depends on the application
Exactly what one chooses to regard as topics in any particular application will vary according to the needs of the application, the nature of the information, and the uses to which the topic map will be put: In a thesaurus, topics would represent terms, meanings, and domains…
Merging topics through subject indicators
Any two topics that share one or more subject indicators (or that have the same subject address, in the case of addressable subjects) are considered to be semantically equivalent to a single topic that has the union of the characteristics (the names, occurrences and…
Occurrences link topics to resources
A topic may be linked to one or more information resources that are deemed to be relevant to the topic in some way. Such resources are called occurrences of the topic. An occurrence could be a monograph devoted to a particular topic, for example, or an article about the topic…
Subject identity in topic maps
The goal with topic maps is to achieve a one-to-one relationship between topics and the subjects that they represent, in order to ensure that all knowledge about a particular subject can be accessed via a single topic. However, sometimes the same subject is represented by more…
Scope vs facet
As mentioned above, scope should not be confused with facets. The two mechanisms are different and complementary. Whereas scope can be seen as a filtering mechanism that is based on properties of the topics, facets provide for filtering based on properties of the information…
Topic types and multiple indexes
Topics can be categorized according to their kind. In a topic map, any given topic is an instance of zero or more topic types. This corresponds to the categorization inherent in the use of multiple indexes in a book (index of names, index of works, index of places, etc.), and…
Typed associations between topics
Just as topics and occurrences can be grouped according to type (e.g., composer/opera/country and mention/article/commentary, respectively), so too can associations between topics be grouped according to their type. The association type for the relationships mentioned above are…
The topic association
The really interesting thing, however, is to be able to describe relationships between topics, and for this the topic map standard provides a construct called the topic association. A topic association asserts a relationship between two or more topics. Examples might be as…
An index maps the knowledge in a book
The word “index” means many things, most of which relate to pointing in some way (“index”, plural “indicis”, is Latin for forefinger, informer, or sign). The sense we are interested in is that given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as: 6. Alphabetical list, usu. at end of book…
Context of a topic
Assignments of topic characteristics are always made within a specific context, which may or may not be explicit. For example, if I (yet again) mention “tosca”, I should expect my readers to think of the opera by Puccini (or its principle character), because of the context that…
A topic can be anything whatsoever
What then is a topic? A topic, in its most generic sense, can be any “thing” whatsoever — a person, an entity, a concept, really anything — regardless of whether it exists or has any other specific characteristics, about which anything whatsoever may be asserted by any means…
Topics, associations and occurrences
The key features of a typical index are thus: topics (identified by their names, of which there may be more than one); associations between topics; and occurrences of topics (pointed to via locators). For each of these constructs it is useful to be able to say something about…
Topics without names
Normally topics have explicit names, since that makes them easier to talk about.[4] However, topics don't always have names: A simple cross reference, such as “see page 97”, is considered to be a link to a topic that has no (explicit) name.