X-TOP: Design and Implementation of TopicMaps Platform for Ontology Construction on Legacy Systems

Different from other ontology languages, TopicMap is capable of integrating numerous amount of heterogenous information resources using the locational information without any information transformation. Although many conventional editors have been developed for topic maps, they are standalone-type only for writing XTM documents. As a result, these tools request too much time for handling large-scale data and provoke practical problems to integrate with legacy systems which are mostly based on relational database. In this paper, we model a large-scale topic map structure based on XTM 1.0 into RDB structure to minimize the processing time and build up the ontology in legacy systems. We implement a topic map platform called X-TOP that can enhance the efficiency of ontology construction and provide interoperability between XTM documents and database. Moreover, we can use conventional SQL tools and other application development tools for topic map construction in X-TOP. The X-TOP is implemented to have 3-tier architecture to support flexible user interfaces and diverse DBMS. This paper shows the usability of X-TOP by means of the comparison with conventional tools and the application to healthcare cancer ontology management.