Main Index
Pepys Diary Topic Map : Help
Navigating the Topic Map

This view of the Pepys Diary Topic Map uses a simple page-per-topic approach, that is that almost every page displays all of the information known about a given topic. Much of the text is clickable, links are shown in blue.

The Index Page

The index page shows all of the topics in the topic map in a sorted list on the right hand side. However, this list is sorted using sort keys which result in all events getting sorted near the top of the list and in chronological order so the sorting may not seem entirely intuitive at the moment.

The left-hand side of the index page shows a topic class hierarchy, which lists all of the types of "thing" described by the topic map. Things are divided into classes, one class can be a subclass (a special kind of) a broader class. For example, "Birth" is a subclass of "Event".

Topic Pages

All of the rest of the pages in the topic map have the following layout:

At the top of the page, the header bar provides global navigation links to the topic map index page, to the "About" page that gives more information about this project, and to this help page. Following this, the name(s) of the topic are displayed followed by the links to the topic(s) that define the type of the topic, for example Samuel Pepys is of type Man. Below this line, the page is split into two halves showing information as described below.
NOTE: not all sections are present on all pages. If there is no relevant information for the current topic, then a section will be ommitted.

The left half of the page displays the following information:

  1. All of the names of the topic, including name variants (typically used for sorting purposes). The "Scope" of a name shows a context for the name. For example the topic Jemima Montague has three names: "Jemima Montague", "Jemima Carteret" (in the scope "Maiden Name" indicating that this was her name before marriage" and "Mrs Jem" in the scope "Samuel Pepys", in this topic map, names that are particular to Sam (he does tend to use informal names in the diary) are placed in this scope to distinguish those names from the "formal" names of the subjects.
  2. The "Subject Indicators" section lists the formal identifiers assigned by the topic map author to the subject, these are the identifiers that should be used in any RDF or topic map application that would like to be able to integrate with the information contained here. We make use of the subject description pages provided by PepysDiary.com where possible, and create our own identifiers in other cases.
    NOTE: at the moment, most of the Subject Indicators starting http://www.techquila.com/psi/ DO NOT resolve to anything. This will get fixed!
  3. The "Related Topics" section lists all of the relationships between this topic and other topics in the topic map. In most cases, each relationship is listed separately, starting with the type of the relationship, and then listing all of the other topics involved in the relationship. The "role" played by each topic in the relationship is shown in a smaller font between square brackets. In a few cases, a lot of separate relationships are collapsed into a long list where all of the related topics are held in the same relationship to the topic described on the page. It sounds complex when described like this, but hopefully it should be pretty intuitive.

On the right hand side, the following information is shown:

  1. The "Resources" section lists web resources which are related to the topic. The address of the resource is shown, followed by type of the resource in a smaller font between square brackets.
  2. The section "Topics Of This Type" lists all of the topics in the topic maps which are typed by the current topic. So for example the topic A Meal lists all of the meals described in the topic map.
  3. The section "Resources Of This Type" lists all of the web resources linked to from the topic map which are typed by the current topic. So for example the Diary Entry page lists all of the diary entries in the topic map.