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

Lightness of Being

The Web is creating another revolution in semantic communication. Linear text patterned after the spoken word is not well suited for rapid, just-in-time communication on the Internet. It is too dense, too cumbersome, too time-consuming, and too vague. It has the wrong shape for display on a monitor, and it is not attractive. Worse yet, it tends to be inefficient and unclear. The critical links between ideas that comprise the essence of meaning often remain implicit, buried in a barrage of linear semantics.

What is emerging is a form of semantic communication with a lightness of being, a skeletal knowledge structure that is concise, precise, and easily assimilated. This form is the Semantic Web, patterned after thought rather ...