Building a topic hierarchy for indexing content

Question

Im looking to build a topic map to catagorize content.

For example the Topic 'Art' may have sub categories of 'Art History', 'Painting', 'Sculpture' etc etc.

I've crawled a few online resources, but I've hit a problem related to how I wish to use the hierarchy.

I've got a lot of content that I wish to index by topic. So to give the above example, if a user searches for 'Art' then they will not only get anything that mentions 'Art', but also anything that mentions 'Painting', even if it doesnt mention 'Art'. Fair enough.

But if, in another part of my heirarchy, I have 'House Maintenance', for example, then that might also have a subtopic of 'Painting'.

But then if a user searches for 'Art', my engine will say 'well, Painting is a sub category of 'Art', so I'll include this peice of content thats all about the best colour to paint your bathroom walls....

Has anyone come across this problem before? I've tried googling, but without knowing the exact terminology its hard to make headway....

EDIT: More succinctly, 'Painting' is a subtopic of 'Art', but if something is about 'Painting' then it doesnt neecssarily follow that its about 'Art', since 'Art' is not the only parent of 'Painting'.

Answer 1

In "topic maps", as it is understood in the related standard you can set different "scopes" to a topic. So "painting" may be part of two scopes, with different meanings.

A topic map: http://www.ontopia.net/page.jsp?id=vizigator

Scope: http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html#stp-scope

Answer 2

If the Topic Map you are creating is built on Topic Maps technology, then subjectIdentifiers can be used to distinguish between two Topics with the same name (both named "Painting") that actually represent two different Subjects (Painting as an Art form, and Painting in the sense of home renovation).

If someone queries about Art and you drill down to Painting, then you can return only those entries related to 'Painting as an Art form' because those Painting entries are no longer thrown together on one heap.