CONSTRUCTION OF TOPIC MAPS WITH CONCEPTUAL MODELING METHOD

摘要

The Topic Map (TM) acts as a navigator for information and knowledge management. It is a tool to represent knowledge structures and is able to connect the information resources together. A TM is basically composed of topics, associations, occurrences and other items. Since too much information is involved in a TM, the construction process will be difficult and complex. Hence, some effective methods or techniques are required. The paper introduces a conceptual modeling method to construct a TM on the basis of the following facts. Conceptual models are able to represent knowledge structure in an effective way, to express hierarchical structures of arbitrary depth, to vest abstract objects with many kinds of attributes, and to encode associative links between related pieces of knowledge. A specific example is given to clearly demonstrate the whole process for creating a TM. At last, the paper analyzes the merits of TMs and explains the reason why TMs can be used to represent the knowledge in a semantic way.