Scaling Topic Maps

The encyclopedieof Diderot and d'Alembert is unique in building an open discourse model based on maps of knowledge and a wide-ranging coverage of the knowledge of its time. d'Alembert's Discours preliminaireprefigured many of the topic map paradigms down to the very metaphor. However, the encyclopediewas still bound by the inevitable restrictions of the print medium. A completely non-literary example, the nascent European eGovernment Resource Network (section 2), shows the need to transcend the encyclopedic model. In many cases we need both distributed registries and repositories. These requirements give rise to prototypical implementations for cross-implementation linked registries (section 3) that gives a hint at how registries can genuinely scale to a distributed world of knowledge.