XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web

A Brief History of the Topic Maps Paradigm

The work on topic maps began in 1991 when the Davenport Group was founded by UNIX system vendors (and others, including the publisher O'Reilly & Associates). The vendors were under customer pressure to improve consistency in their printed documentation. There was concern about the inconsistent use of terms in the documentation of systems and in published books on the same subjects. System vendors wished to include O'Reilly's independently created documentation on X-Windows, under license, seamlessly in their system manuals. One major problem was how to provide master indexes for independently maintained, constantly changing technical documentation aggregated into system manual sets by the vendors of ...