Usage-oriented topic maps building approach

Abstract

In this paper, we present a collaborative and incremental construction approach of multilingual Topic Maps based on enrichment and merging techniques. In recent years, several Topic Map building approaches have been proposed endowed with different characteristics. Generally, they are dedicated to particular data types like text, semi-structured data, relational data, etc. We note also that most of these approaches take as input monolingual documents to build the Topic Map. The problem is that the large majority of resources available today are written in various languages, and these resources could be relevant even to non-native speakers. Thus, our work is driven towards a collaborative and incremental method for Topic Map construction from textual documents available in different languages. To enrich the Topic Map, we take as input a domain thesaurus and we propose also to explore the Topic Map usage which means available potential questions related to the source documents. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.