This introduction is a tour de force through TMQL, the upcoming Topic Map query language.

Quite a number of people store their topic maps in relational databases. This is all well and good, but when it comes to retrieving the content effectively, I do not think that SQL is a convenient and adequate query language. This opinionated, tongue-in-cheek rant tries to compile all arguments so far why an SQL model as suggested with TMRQL is good as implementation but not good for a TM query language.

This tutorial introduces into Topic Map development using Java and TMAPI, a standardized API for TM processing.

This technology preview shows some of the future features of an upcoming new Perl Topic Map distribution. It covers top-level IO management with materialized and non-materialized topic maps.

This document reports on our activities around building and maintaining a knowledge server based on Topic Maps and written in Perl. We describe our objectives as they shift over time, and also the long-term experiences in operating the machinery and the impact on our student population. On the more technical side we walk through the underlying technologies, the functionality of the server and various architectural considerations.

This is a pleading for a path language to be a strong component in TMQL, the Topic Map Query Language.

The AsTMa* language family has been designed to support all major phases of Topic Map engineering. In the first part of three installments we fathom out to which extent AsTMa*, a family of languages to notate and process Topic Maps, can support to notate literature references. The second and third part we demonatrate how to create an ontology for academic literature, and to access this information and convert it into other formats.

The AsTMa* language family has been designed to support all major phases of Topic Map engineering. In the first part of three installments we fathom out to which extent AsTMa*, a family of languages to notate and process Topic Maps, can support to notate literature references. The second and third part we demonatrate how to create an ontology for academic literature, and to access this information and convert it into other formats.

Merging of topic maps is one of the key concepts in TM engineering and has been so far explicitly built into all Topic Map standards. This article will try to demonstrate how an ontology definition language like AsTMa! can control declaratively application specific and generic uniqueness requirements to trigger merging. It also shows how AsTMa?, a topic map query and transformation language, can actually implement general merging.

The Topic Map standard contains two predefined association types, class-instance and superclass-subclass which should be used in a consistent manner to build a proper type system (taxonomy) for any authored map. This short article suggests a best current practice using these association types to allow merging and reasoning by a Topic Map processor.

When developing Topic Map based applications it is indispensable to deal with the data structures the underlying API provides to the programmer. This article tries to demonstrate how this can be accomplished with a significant abstraction using an XPath derivate, XTMPath. We will show basic use to navigate through Topic Map related data structures but also a way how to create new data based on XTMPath expressions. All this will be done using XTM::base, a set of Perl packages for Topic Map processing.

Topic Maps are capable of denoting information which is in some way qualified or commented on. This document tries to describe how reification of associations can be used to qualify statements.

When you consider to distribute content to subscribers your current choice might be RSS for simple headline syndication. In this article we demonstrate how a translation between RSS and TMSS, a Topic Map based incarnation of headline syndication might be integrated into today's web sites. In the course we present a constraint language for Topic Maps which may be used for a richer and more flexible content transfer.