I notice that I'm lost in a maze of twisty passages, all alike, or are they all different? I entered this maze building an example Topic Map using wiki pages and references. In this page, I make notes of some places I've visited. There are many interesting passages in this maze and I might want to wander those later. For now, I want a bit of a map so I can be a bit more deliberate about where I wander next.
This page is Personal. In the past couple weeks I have been experimenting with the use of wiki reference items to annotate pages in various of my wikis. Annotations and metadata and thinking about personal knowledge management and social knowledge management are fresh in my mind and easily draw my attention. See How to Annotate Wiki Pages and Digital Gardening.
In a couple experiments we have found a plausible way to represent topic map abstractions within federated wiki.
This template and the several associated pages are an abstraction for defining a topic map relationship.
The project page where I organized the experiment. Includes links to the example I explored.
To better illustrate the potential utility of topic maps, we need a better example. See Example Topic Map.
bookmarks
A collection of bookmarks while I was making sense of topic maps and a few literate-programming-style notes to clarify my motivations at some of the stops along the learning journey.
Detailed exploration of bringing together information from many different models and enabling structured discussion across the different models. Also includes and implementation of Jack Park's challenge—a minimal example that tests the representational power of the data model. Multiple Subject Map Patterns for Relationships and TMDM Information Items. Steven R. Newcomb, Patrick Durusau. Extreme Markup Languages 2005 Proceedings. page 
Coolheads Consulting Publications. Steven and Victoria Newcomb retired in 2019. page
A Perspective on the Quest for Global Knowledge Interchange. Steve Newcomb. Chapter 3 of XML Topic Maps - Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web (Jack Park and Sam Hunting, eds.), 2003 pdf
A semantic integration methodology. Steven R. Newcomb. Extreme Markup Languages 2003. wayback
Archive of aggregated proceedings from Extreme Markup Languages conference 2001-2007. Sorted by date. wayback
I wondered what happened in 2007 because the topic maps stuff seems to end there. My guess is that the rise of twitter and facebook kinda took all the oxygen out of the room for topic maps as it did for blogging and tagging and microformats. But I searched for things about RDF and OWL because I knew those terms and didn't know topic maps at the time.
Jack Park used the phrase "frame-base representation" and I went looking for what that meant. Frame (artificial_intelligence) wikipedia
Somewhere among the documents from Steven Newcomb or a collaborator I found the phrase "ontological engineering" — something like building topic maps was a kind of ontological engineering.
I kinda hate the word Ontology. But there I was, refreshing my memory to remind myself why that word figures so prominently in all these related conversations. wikipedia
Protégé is a free, open-source platform that provides a growing user community with a suite of tools to construct domain models and knowledge-based applications with ontologies. site
Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology. site
Oh. I see. Ontology is exactly what I'm doing with all these annotations. Trying to make sense of the nature of reality and trying to share what I've learned on the way.
Seems like the Topic Maps people were also wrestling with RDF and looking for shared representations. I know RDF has SPARQL for querying over the graph. w3c
And I know that El Dorado leveraged querying over a graph to extraordinary effect. See El Dorado UI, Ontology v. Stigmergy, and Constructing Explanations.