In her report from Extreme Markup Languages 2000, held in Montreal last month, Liora Alschuler outlines the coming exploration of how Topic Maps and RDF may work together.

Alschuler writes:

As a result of Montreal, representatives from the W3C RDF activity and the XML Topic Maps group have committed to a series of unofficial joint teleconferences to begin this month. One of the first topics of discussion will be an RDF schema definition of a topic map. According to Freese and Miller, it looks like this is a viable and sound basis on which to open discussion on the possible convergence of the two specifications.

These will be important meetings between XML's strongest metadata contingents, who hail from the two major camps in XML development: topic maps from the ISO/SGML folks, and RDF from the W3C.

More information:

• XML Topic Maps Working Group
• Report on Topic Maps community, June 2000, XML.com