Topic maps self-control

Abstract

The ISO standard ISO/IEC 13250 Topic Maps offers a flexible and powerful technique for knowledge representation. The standard defines the general concepts and provides – with intention – just the necessary minimum of semantic. But knowledge representation requires more semantic – earlier publications identified “templates”, “type hierarchies”, “association properties”, “inferences”, and “constraints”. All of them can be expressed as topic maps which simplifies the processing by topic map tools. The paper introduces the “self-control” of topic maps and models the listed semantics as topic maps.