The Topic Maps Lab has sent two people to the March 2009 meeting of ISO/IEC JTC 1 / SC 34. Benjamin Bock, Hannes Niederhausen, and additionally Xuân Baldauf (who is also from Leipzig) will take part in continuing the standardization work of the Topic Maps Standards.

The Topic Maps standards are created by the International Organization for Standardization. The responsible subcommittee 34 is divided into five working groups:

• WG 1: Markup Languages
• WG 2: Information Presentation
• WG 3: Information Association
• WG 4: Office Open XML
• WG 5: Document Interoperability

SC 34/WG 3 is responsible for producing standard architectures for information management and interchange based on ISO 8879, Standard Generalized Markup Language and related standards, including, but not limited to:

• Information linking and addressing
• Time-based information management
• Representation of knowledge structures, indexes, etc.
• Management of behavioral components in interactive documents

or, summarized: for Topic Maps.

The agenda includes TMQL, TMCL, TMRM, CTM and the Graphic Notation. If time allows, we’ll also work on expressing Dublin Core Metadata using Topic Maps. We’ll keep you up to date on what’s happening.