The Universal Pantograph Representation is the essence of networking

One liner:

Topic maps help people help each other to find stuff. Any stuff.

Therefore, it’s a new product category (some would say a new weltanschauung, but that would never sell). Differentiators:

1. Finding is better than searching. Google-type solutions are “search” solutions. They are about processing huge masses of data to return pages based on citation analysis. Unfortunately, there’s no direct way for human A to help human B improve the result set — except at the cost of centralized Cookie-based solutions that and IP-tracking technologies that are invasive and “evil.”

2. Finding is better than computation. Semantic Web-type solutions are “computation” solutions. They are about categorizing resources via controlled vocabularies (syntactically, URIs) so that machines can reason about the results. Unfortunately, there are at least two defects to this approach: First, the results often tend to things that humans can already do for themselves easily; the paradigmatic example in TBL’s SciAm article is ordering airline tickets. Second, not all data is or should be represented in URL syntax. Hence the poverty of use cases. Of course, this may change. But in eight years of trying, it hasn’t. (The counter example here would be ISO 8879 (1986), which took what, 15 years to turn into a dominant data format after morphing, technically and sociologically, into XML. But still.)

By contrast, topic maps:

1. Enable humans to name and describe the objects of interest that they wish to find (“subjects”), thereby permitting

2. Other humans to help them, so that

3. Subject-based social networks develop, and

4. Refine their ability to find stuff together, thus

5. Making everybody connected smarter about stuff they want to find.

It’s a virtuous cycle. Topic maps are a well-proven technology, but they have not yet been implemented on the LAMP stack, so far as I know; and implementing them on the Drupal platform provides the technical, web-based community building tools that have always been implied by the topic map paradigm, but not yet made available.