Topic Mapping Roundup

2003-1-9

(This document is continued in Back to Topic Mapping, 2003-5-28).

There's been lots of talk about topic mapping over the last six months or so. Here are some notes so I don't forget it all.

Vague history

Matt Mower wrote LiveTopics for Radio, to make a finer-grained alternative to Radio's 'categories'.

Seb Paquet proposed the concept of a system to allow groups of people to categorise their blog posts and connect them all together.

I wrote the first draft of Ridiculously Easy Group Forming.

Matt Mower commented on Seb's ideas.

Seb and Eric Hanson started the group-forming mailing list and the group-forming Drupal.

Notes for Ridiculously Easy Group Forming implementation

Seb's original post mentions some requirements for R.E.G.F.:

1. Simple creation: this could be an XML-RPC call or something like TrackBack. Perhaps both, so both Radio and Movable Type can implement it easily.

2. RSS feeds and 4. Web archive: use an existing blogging tool to maintain a blog per topic?

3. Easy posting: use the TrackBack protocol.

5. Editable description: sounds like a Wiki.

Could this be hacked together with existing tools? The MT standalone trackback could handle the posting and RSS, but it doesn't make blogs. I have coded a TB implementation in Python (as has Mark Paschal) that could be bolted on to bzero to do #2, #3 and #4. #5 implies a wiki page per topic. #1 can be coded on to my TB implementation.

Update (2003-01-15): The Internet Topic Exchange is now active. Go give it a try!