Topic Maps (ISO 13250:2000) featured in no less than 14 presentations, two tutorials and three vendor stands at XML Europe 2000 in Paris this week.

The ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associations between resources in SGML has recently made the transition to the XML world, using XLink. The XML Topic Maps initiative is sponsored by GCA's IDEAlliance (XTM will soon be online at topicmaps.org).

Vendors InfoLoom, Ontopia and STEP UK were demonstrating software at the show. Ontopia will shortly make available an open-source Python-based topic map engine, tmproc.

(Thanks to Liora Alschuler for information contributed to this news item.)