Topic Map Basics

A topic map is a collection of structured mark-up external to any resources it may describe. It is common to think of the topic map as a layer 'floating' above resources which may be retrievable electronic files such as web pages or files, or other forms of information (perhaps information which is retrieved manually or retrieved as the result of performing a database query). There is a clean division between the topic map and the resources referenced from the topic map that is only crossed by the topic map occurrence construct (described later). This division between the topics and associations in 'topic space' and the resources documented by the topic map is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 - Topic space and resource space (SVG Version)