XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web

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Chapter 1. Let There Be Light
Jack Park

Opening Salvo
We are smart enough to realize we are stupid, and stupid enough to make the problem of becoming
smarter hard.
--Anders Sandberg
[1]

[1]
From "Amplifying Cognition: Extending Memory and Intelligence," 1997. Accessed online at
http://www.extropy.org/ideas/journal/previous/1997/11-01.html
.
I know; that's a heady, arrogant way to open a book. But this book is about heady stuff, and I'll try to
prove it. To do so, I shall cast the information this book presents in a light far brighter than topic maps,
computers, indeed, the Universe and Everything.
[2]
That's my intent, anyway.
[2]
With apologies to the late Douglas Adams. See his site at
http://www.douglasadams.com/
.
David Weinberger had this to say about the Web:
The world that we've carved for ourselves out of the rock and ice of the earth has always been a social
world, one in which we share interests and presuppositions, and, most of all, a language. The sociality
of the world has always been hemmed in by the fact of distance, a type of enforced intimacy that we
take for granted. But there's no matter on the Web and thus no distance. It is a purely social realm; all
we have are one another and what we've written. And what we've written has been written for others.
The Web is a public place that we've built by doing public things.
[3]

[3]
From "Our Web," JOHO (Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization), April 20, 2001. Accessed online at
http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-apr20-01.html#our
. A note on this quote: I first spotted it in
the July 2001 issue of Linux Journal, and by way of Google I found it in JOHO.
It is not specifically topic maps that are heady stuff. Not even the new XTM specification. It's the
World Wide Web, in particular, the Semantic Web aspect of it, that's heady stuff, together with all the
stuff we've written.
[4]
Topic maps are part of the Semantic Web; of course, topic maps are not the
whole story, but certainly XTM is destined to be an important tool in the vast and growing
armamentarium emerging under the Semantic Web moniker. We have seen the Web grow from being
a space where technical papers were shared to a space where just about everything humans think about
is somehow covered by one or a zillion Web sites. And, in human interaction, we have experienced
information overload. Indeed, information overload appears to be ubiquitous.
[4]
When I wrote this during March 2001, Google said it was searching 1,346,966,000 Web pages.
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