from http://www.coolheads.com/SRNPUBS/ieee-mm-topicmaps-article.pdf

• 1991, SOFABED: Developers initiated work on topic maps in 1991 when Unix system vendors (and others, including the publisher O’Reilly and Associates) founded the Davenport Group. The vendors were under customer pressure to improve consistency in their printed documentation. Users were concerned about the inconsistent use of terms in the documentation of systems and in published books on the same subjects. Vendors wanted to include independently and seamlessly created documentation under license in their system manuals. One major problem was providing master indexes for independently maintained, constantly changing technical documentation aggregated into system manual sets by the vendors of such systems. The first attempt at a solution to the problem was humorously called SOFABED (Standard Open Formal Architecture for Browsable Electronic Documents).
• 1992, HyTime & CApH:
  • HyTime was published in 1992 to provide Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML, ISO 8879:1986), the standard on which XML is based, with multimedia and hyperlinking features.
  • 1993, CApH project: The problem of providing living master indexes was so fascinating that a new group was created in 1993, called the Conventions for the Application of HyTime (CApH). The group applied the sophisticated hypertext facilities of the ISO 10744 Hypermedia/Time-based Structuring Language (HyTime) standard. The Graphic Communications Association Research Institute (GCARI, now called IDEAlliance) hosted the CApH activity. After the CApH group reviewed the possibilities of extended hyperlink navigation, it elaborated the SOFABED model, renaming it topic maps.
• 1995-2002, ISO 13250:
  • 1995-2000, HyTM: By 1995, the model was mature enough that the ISO/JTC1/SC18/WG8 working group accepted it as a new work item—a basis for a new international standard. The topic maps standard was ultimately published as ISO/IEC 13250:2000 (http://www.y12.doe.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0129.pdf).
  • 2000, XTM: The XTM is the XML version ISO 13250. The XTM initiative began as soon as the ISO 13250 topic maps standard was published. Working with IDEAlliance and others, the authors founded an independent organization called TopicMaps.Org (http://www.topicmaps.org) for the purpose of creating and publishing an XTM 1.0 specification as quickly as possible. In less than one year, TopicMaps.Org was chartered and it delivered the core of the XTM 1.0 specification at the XML 2000 conference in Washington, D.C. on 4 Dec. 2000.
  • 2002, The ISO 13250:2002 version 2 has both HyTM and XTM specification.

Veltman, K. H. (2004). Towards a semantic web for culture. Journal of Digital Information, 4(4). (http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v04/i04/Veltman)

Today's semantic Web deals with meaning in a very restricted sense and offers static solutions. This is adequate for many scientific, technical purposes and for business transactions requiring machine-to-machine communication, but does not answer the needs of culture. Science, technology and business are concerned primarily with the latest findings, the state of the art, i.e. the paradigm or dominant world-view of the day. In this context, history is considered non-essential because it deals with things that are out of date.

今日的語義網(semantic web)以非常限定的觀點處理意義，並且提供靜態的解決方案。這能滿足許多科學性的、技術的、與商業上交易的所需機器對機器溝通的目的。但是這並無法回應文化上的需求。科學、技術與商業都關注於最新的發現，與現況。即，典範或是主導性的世界觀。在這樣的脈絡下，歷史所關注的是非必要的，因為歷史處理的都是過去的事情。

By contrast, culture faces a much larger challenge, namely, to re-present changes in ways of knowing; changing meanings in different places at a given time (synchronically) and over time (diachronically). Culture is about both objects and the commentaries on them; about a cumulative body of knowledge; about collective memory and heritage. Here, history plays a central role and older does not mean less important or less relevant. Hence, a Leonardo painting that is 400 years old, or a Greek statue that is 2500 years old, typically have richer commentaries and are often more valuable than their contemporary equivalents. In this context, the science of meaning (semantics) is necessarily much more complex than semantic primitives. A semantic Web in the cultural domain must enable us to trace how meaning and knowledge organisation have evolved historically in different cultures.

The paper examines five issues to address this challenge:

1. different world-views (i.e. a shift from substance to function and from ontology to multiple ontologies);
2. developments in definitions and meaning;
3. distinctions between words and concepts;
4. new classes of relations;
5. dynamic models of knowledge organisation.

These issues reveal that historical dimensions of cultural diversity in knowledge organisation are also central to classification of biological diversity.

New ways are proposed of visualizing knowledge using a time/space horizon to distinguish between universals and particulars. It is suggested that new visualization methods make possible a history of questions as well as of answers, thus enabling dynamic access to cultural and historical dimensions of knowledge. Unlike earlier media, which were limited to recording factual dimensions of collective memory, digital media enable us to explore theories, ways of perceiving, ways of knowing; to enter into other mindsets and world-views and thus to attain novel insights and new levels of tolerance. Some practical consequences are outlined.