Historical Note

We realized that we were working on different sides of the same vision (a new paradigm in communication?) and that we needed each other, or better said that our vision required a concerted effort and a research community to become reality.

The Knowledge Federation community recognizes and honors the excellent work done by the people involved in developing the Topic Maps standard. Knowledge federation is not a replacement but rather a continuation of the topic maps research, as suggested in Steve Newcomb's chapter A Perspective on the Quest for Global Knowledge Interchange of Jack Park and Sam Hunting's XML Topic Maps. While the topic maps research is often specialized and focused on such questions as standards and semantic interoperability, a focus of knowledge federation is on high-level knowledge sharing and synthesis for solving intricate and urgent world problems.