Techquila

I'll be presenting a new paper, "Beyond PSIs - Topic Map Design Patterns" at Extreme Markup Lanuages 2003. For those readers who haven't had the pleasure of attending an Extreme, it is four days of hard-core markup geekery. Much fun and well worth a trip. Details on the paper follow...

Beyond PSIs...Abstract

Software design patterns give programmers a high level language for discussing the design of software applications. For topic maps to achieve widespread adoption and improved interoperability, a set of topic map design patterns are needed to codify existing practices and make them available to a wider audience. Combining structured descriptions of design patterns with Published Subject Identifiers would enable not only the reuse of design approaches but also encourage the use of common sets of PSIs. This paper presents the arguments for developing and publishing topic map design patterns and a proposed notation for diagramming design patterns based on UML. Finally, by way of examples, the paper presents some design patterns for representation of traditional classification schemes such as thesauri, hierarchical and faceted classification.

As usual, the paper will go up on this site in the near future. The examples are in fact already on this site, in the paper Topic Map Patterns For Information Architecture.