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

Knowledge as Interpretation

With the rise of the availability of information and its related traffic on the Internet comes a concomitant need to exploit and manage information flow and storage using more intelligent means. Because information actually forms an information continuum that ranges from completely unstructured data^[1] to very structured knowledge, a variety of intelligent methods must be employed to filter, fuse, and represent data that ultimately becomes user- and institution-level knowledge.

^[1] Really, this is a misnomer or an actual misunderstanding, as Steven Newcomb points out in Chapter 3: there is no unstructured data. We concur. In the information continuum, which we discuss shortly, unstructured data is simply data that is ...