There some attention going to interoperability between topic maps and RDF:

http://mulberrytech.com/Extreme/Proceedings/html/2005/Cregan01/EML2005Cregan01.html

http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-rdftm-survey-20050329/

Slow death. It's a beautiful technology ("everything is a topic"), but too hard to get your head around, and not useful/overkill for most projects.

A bit of life *and* death, in my opinion. There has been a lot of talk in the past, but as the hype has slowed down people has got the impression that Topic Maps are dying. the truth is that there is an upswing in practical Topic Maps use, with applications and tools maturing and becoming more mainstream.

Also, there is Topic Maps, the concept and philosophy, and there's the Topic Maps specifications; the hype couldn't keep these separate, and now the concept that was hard to get is easily got while the easy specifications have proven themselves slightly more complicated to grok. Funny reversal of state, really.

Anyway, we're all too busy to try and hype Topic Maps to the public. :)

Dead? What do you mean, dead? If anything, the use of Topic Maps is growing. Google searches don't prove anything, but searching for the phrase "topic maps" and file type PDF gives me two hits from 2005 on the first page. Not bad, given that older papers will have more links to them...

You must've got Google on a bad day, Todd! :-)

I searched for "Topic Maps" and "2005" with file type "PDF", updated in the past year, and Google returned 744 hits! There were conference papers, drafts of new standards, powerpoint slides, product brochures, press releases ...

http://www.google.com/search?as_q=2005&num=100&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=topic+maps&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=pdf

Excellent comments and posts on Topic Maps (except for one). Please don't missunderstand my point, I would love to have Topic Map methodologies ready to go but the reality is that they are not here today. Next year? Two Years? How can we enable this technology, hide the complexities, and have mass adoption.

I guess the question is what "here today" means to you. If it means "mass adoption today", then, no, Topic Maps are not here today. Mass adoption takes a while, because it requires the sort of maturity brings simple frameworks and applications. It's not that Topic Maps are complex, but most of the tools are at this point quite complex.

That's not necessarily the same as Topic Maps not being here, though. There are several companies that make their living from nothing but Topic Maps work, and there are many commercial Topic Maps-based projects in production out there. (Enough for the support of them to make up a significant portion of my daily life, actually.)

Topic Maps are also making inroads in standards work and government regulations, at least in Norway.

But "mass adoption"? It will, by necessity, take some years for that to happen.