A couple of days ago I wrote about my need to create a Controlled vocabulary for del.icio.us. After trying for a while I couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted. In my searching for an answer I came across an article by Lars Marius Garshol titled Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! - Making sense of it all. I’ve played with Topic maps before and haven’t been able to get them to work. Now that I’m a little wiser and have learnt about taxonomies, thesauri and controlled vocabularies, Lars’ article showed me what I was missing. In my ignorance I did not know that I was trying to mix the various metadata structures together and force them into a topic map. Now I can see that topic maps can represent all three (or more) structures in harmony and the pain caused by trying to force them together into a single structure is gone.
What does this mean for del.icio.us and me? I believe I can now handle all my needs with a topic map that suits the way I want to navigate the data. I’ve wanted to build a map of the knowledge surrounding The Ontology of the Human Observer (the coaching model I use) and now I have the answer.