Eric van der Vlist has posted a brief note to the www-rdf-interest mailing list concerning a simple approach for representing XML topic maps in RDF.

Following ongoing discussions between RDF and XTM developers as to the ultimate compatibility of their specifications, van der Vlist has applied an approach he published last year for translating XLink documents to RDF.

Despite his approach being, in his own words, "a quick hack," van der Vlist obtained useful results:

I find the result quite encouraging, though and the topic map structure appears well in the generated triples (to give it a try, just past the RDF document into the online SIRPAC interface [2] that will also give you a graphical representation of these triples).

(Cached results as posted to the mailing list.)

Van der Vlist closes by explaining that the "right way" to define an RDF representation of a Topic Maps is to work from the Topic Map data model rather than using a syntactic transformation. Nevertheless, he sees it as "an encouraging sign or proof of concept to show that Topic Maps can be represented in RDF."

(Disclosure: van der Vlist is an xmlhack contributor.)