With Linked Topic Maps the motto of the TMRA 2009 conference was about spinning a global web of interchangeable and linkable topic maps. Linked Topic Maps was about the lightweight semantic integration of heterogeneous sources of structured and unstructured data, based on the integration model provided by Topic Maps. With the Topic Maps 2010 conference in Oslo the first applications of linked topic maps in industry emerged.

Within the last year the stack of freely available Topic Maps software grew considerably. The technology is ready for the next level of scale. But scalability needs data. It was Kal Ahemd who coined at the TMRA 2009 conference: “Information wants to be free. Information wants to be a topic map.”

With the TMRA 2010 conference we want to explore the various approaches to make Topic Maps based data available. There is a wide range of means for producing these maps: starting with generic Topic Maps editors, over web portals and domain specific desktop applications, to advanced approaches of exposing data sources as virtual topic maps. And how does fit this in the picture of the Linked Data web.

Besides the general techniques and methods of making Topic Maps data available and usable the handling of very large topic maps is of vital interest. How to use databases with several terabyte in a Topic Maps environment, how to synchronise such a data volume with the underlying data
sources once it is updated.

Consequently new data sources generate new applications. Which new kind applications are possible and already implemented? Do these application require now data sources which are not available in the Topic Maps world today? Generally, all kinds of applications are in interest – the scaling, web based ones and the applications on the enterprise level. They all have one in common: they all need information which behaves as topic maps.

The goal of the TMRA 2010 conference is bringing together all the ideas, concepts and implementations which will help to make information accessible and usable in a Topic Mappish way. The paradigm of the TMRA 2010 conference is: Everything which behaves like a topic map is a topic map, irrespectively of its origin. It’s all about paving the way for global knowledge federation.