Developing a Topic Map

Abstract

WebKat.hu is the online catalogue of Internet resources related to the Hungarian cultural heritage. The service is operated by the John von Neumann Digital Library. Since 2000, the catalogue was completed with a thesaurus, the development of which was marked by an important milestone in 2003. In order to meet new users' needs, to make the range of services even more comprehensive, and to attract new users, an appropriate topic map was implemented. First of all, we looked at the relevant products of various companies: Empolis, Infoloom, Totalzoom etc. and carefully considered the timeframe and resources at our disposal. Finally we decided to develop our own system. With a combination of PHP and HTML technologies and based on a MySQL database, we created a web interface that visually displays semantic relations. The topic map is an enhanced searching tool for online sources. http://www.neumann-haz.hu/thesaurus/