Alex writes a rebuttal to my article on Why is it so hard to learn topicmaps?
Alex: "We are hard-working people who write specialised and clever applications, and so we don't really have the time to write "how to sort your CD collection with Topic Maps.
[...]
So, in Peter we trust, and even though I've seen most of the responses (I added some myself) he still says there are no hackable applications that you could use for easily learning about Topic maps. How does he come to that conclusion? I surely don't agree, but it is hard to fight this one back as I don't have the readership he's got."
Um, Alex, you may be overestimating my readership there :) And hopefully this link will help the people who read my blog also find your post (and your excellent blog).
The point of the post, and I stand strongly behind that, is that we need better tutorials, for the reasons I outlined.
I am a big believer in topicmaps, but as it stands, it's almost impossible to learn topicmaps without a large amount of developer background. I believe it doesn't have to be so hard. I believe you don't need to know your data model from your reification in order to get going with topicmaps. A basic understanding of XML should be all that's required. And I believe that providing tutorials like the ones I was attempting to describe is the best way to get topicmaps understood and adopted.
There are clear advantages to using topicmaps technology (for example, you can change the relationships in your data without changing your data model) that we should be able to illustrate with a basic tutorial. Developers generally learn by coding - we should work with that.