Blogging Ottinger (tim)Topic Maps Revisited
One of my teams of students, curious about the value of the topic mapping, undertook it as a short analysis step for an exercise today. I was grateful that his team was willing to try it for me. The team completed the exercise at least as well as any other team. The time spent on the mapping was fairly minimal, so we can say that it was at least not an expensive extra step. At the end of the exercise, the team had one regrettable decision in structuring the otherwise good design. The team’s informal spokesman told me that the same issue had arisen, and had been resolved differently (more correctly) in the topic map that he’d drawn.
Not only did the topic map match reasonably with his actual design, it was superior in at least one way. This gives me more hope that there could be a more sane mapping from problem statements to designs, provided that you have good problem statements.
I am mindful that any analysis of the text of a problem statement cannot be superior in content to the problem statement itself. That was one of the problems with noun/verb analysis, which I believe has been widely/wisely discontinued. Analysis is ultimately the art of asking the right questions and raising the right objections.
Still, there seems to be something more to a concept map than meets the eye.
When you write “topic map” do you really mean topic map, or do you mean concept map?
Comment by Lars Marius Garshol — 2005-September-23 @ 03:28
I knew someone was going to nail me for this one.
Okay, it’s technically a concept map or idea map or mind map. It’s sort of the result you’d get after merging a few topic maps together — not a single topic, but a chain of concept maps.
Guilty as charged. But you see where I’m trying to go with this?
Comment by Administrator — 2005-September-24 @ 10:38