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> An essential part of a working Semantic Web relies on the
> organisation of masses of disjoint information into a
> navigable whole. The only people currently working on this
> are the knowledge experts, information scientists,
> topic map developers, ontologists ... academics and
> scientists. We, the technical writers/authors, whatever,
> have many years of practical experience at doing this. I'm
> not saying we're very good at it, but we have a lot of
> hands on experience and that does count for something. That
> is, I believe, the direction for tomorrow's tech
> writing ... making sense out of chaos. I guess it *is* the
> same basic task we've always done, but never on this
> scale.
At a previous employer, I was part of a topic map team that consisted of software engineers, educational specialists and managers. Our task was to develop an ontology for a knowledge base.
Topic mapping was as new to the other team members as it was to me (I was added to the team because one space was left), and I was quite nervous about what to expect (ontology...does it hurt?). Imagine my surprise when the team leader started talking about extracting meaningful items from large amounts of information, about linking topics by specifying meaningful relations between them, about scoping information, identifying user groups, information domains and classifying them to arrive at a network of topics, associations and relations. Sounds familiar? It sure did to me, it's something that we do on a day to day basis.
My advice: dive into topic maps and semantic webs, find out what they're about, because here's a chance for us to become leaders in a new technology. Especially those of us with a linguistics background will recognize lots of familiar things in topic mapping. Topic maps and semantic databases revolve around language, so I expect that language experts have an important role to play.
A good starting point on topic maps is http://www.topicmap.com/, and especially Steve Pepper's article "The TAO of topic maps".
Best,
Maaike
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