Topic Maps in investment industry


I recently had a chance to discuss Topic Maps business proposal for investment industry...

... and I was asked why big investment companies had not started to actively use Topic Maps. I did some research ... and it was difficult to find good success stories in this area.

Why?

My opinion: big companies are busy... busy leveraging existing technologies (preceding Topic Maps).

Think about these technologies:
- Web services
- XML-based content authoring
- Content management and search
- Portals

These technologies are key components of modern information management for big enterprises.

But current incarnation of these technologies does not deal with information at conceptual level.

Web services are great for data integration. WSDL allows to describe data exchange format. UDDI adds ability to attach basic metadata to Web Services descriptions. But, for some reason, UDDI exists in isolation from enterprise content repository. In many cases Web services are used to provide access to content hidden in information systems.

XML schemas encode semantic information implicitly (take a look at RIXML UML diagrams, for example!). Content management is mostly limited to using metatags and taxonomies.

Traditional portals create only visual illusion of information integration.

And it is not easy to jump today from this data-centric information integration to ontology oriented approach.

It is doable [Example from another industry ], but not easy.

Information integration at conceptual level assumes that we make our enterprise applications ontology-aware. It allows to bring together various pieces of information about the same subject. It does not matter if a piece of information is produced by a web service or is sitting as a static document in the content management system. All applications share the same enterprise ontology.

There is no need to change existing applications to start using topic maps. Ontology awareness can be added as an overlay to an application. The application becomes a producer of factual information supplied to the attached ontology.

Posted: Sun - March 28, 2004 at 03:37 PM      

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