Topic Maps For Libraries

Elaine Svenonius in her recent book The Intellectual Foundations of Information Organization states that the purpose of information organization is "to bring essentially like information together and to differentiate what is not exactly alike". Before databases and the innovations in keyword searching, this was done through classification mechanisms such as controlled vocabularies, uniform headings, taxonomies and classification ontologies; the association of meaningful tags and semantic interconnections to information units for the purposes of finding, identifying, selecting or obtaining the document at some later time. With increasing sophistication these techniques have been employed since the days of the Roman scroll to the current highly automated and digitized library catalog environment.