Making it easier for people to find information and web pages on the Internet

Not being able to find information you know exists somewhere is a very old problem. Information architects have applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem on the web, but there is still increasing amount of difficulty searching for and finding the information that you want. There is hope on the horizon: Topic maps are a new tool available to help solve this problem.

Information on the web is organized using metadata. Metadata is currently the foundation of all information retrieval on the Internet. Metadata can be defined as information about a document, an image, etc. It contains the title of a web page or document, description and keywords that define the subject. Often this data is not enough to clearly define the subject so when searches are made the web page may either not show up, or may show up under a closely related subject. One of the main reasons is that the title and description can be ambiguous or not contain enough information, and the keywords, which can be entered by the author, can have too many subjects, or not clearly define the topic.

According to the abstract on Topic Maps vs. Thesauri written by Lars Marius Garshol "topic maps are organized around topics, and each topic is used to represent some real-world thing." In his abstract Garshol explains how metadata works and other library science type of data retrieval systems such as taxonomy and thesauri. So far these 'library science' ways of organizing and categorizing information for data retrieval are not working very well. Garshol goes on to explain how topic maps can solve this problem. “By using topic maps to represent metadata and subject-based classification it is possible to reuse existing classifications and classification techniques, while at the same time describing the world more precisely where desired” he says.

I personally would love to be able to easily search for a subject on the web and have quick accurate hits! As the information overload on the internet increases our search engines are becoming bogged down in irrelevance. A new accurate way of conducting searches are needed. Hopefully topic maps are the answer. I believe that it is also just as equally important for site owners to try to accurately define their site in the metadata and using the tools available. If web pages aren’t defined well then they may miss their target audience.

Tags: topic+maps, data+retrieval+on+the+web, search+engine+accuracy, defining+web+pages+so+they+can+be+found, metadata