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

Generic Markup Makes Natural Languages More Formal

Starting in 1969, a research effort within IBM began to focus on generic markup in the context of integrated law office information systems.^[6] By 1986, Charles Goldfarb had chaired an ANSI/ISO process that resulted in the adoption of Standard GML, also known as Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML, ISO 8879:1986). Today, SGML is the gold standard for nonproprietary information representation and management; XML, the eXtensible Markup Language of the Web, corresponds closely to a Web-oriented ISO-standard profile of SGML called WebSGML. The Web's traditional language for Web pages, HTML, is basically a specific SGML tag set or markup vocabulary. XML, like SGML, allows users to define their ...