What is it?

This base package contains Perl extensions for Topic Maps

http://www.isotopicmaps.org/

With it you can

• manipulate topic maps via an API
• navigate through TMs via a TMDM-like API (almost TMAPI)
• read/write AsTMa 1.x and 2.x resources
• read LTM resources
• read/write XTM 1/2 resources
• create virtualized topic maps
• use a topic map backend store
• add drivers for your own native store
• add indices to speed up things
• query topic maps via TMQL (query language, in the working)
• and more

Prerequisites

Of course, TM::* relies heavily on other Perl packages. Most of them (hopefully all) should be resolved automatically if you use the CPAN frontend.

Installation

This module should be completely installable via the cpan frontend. To build the extensions manually, unpack this distribution somewhere, and exercise the usual incantation:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

You will need perl version 5.8 or better to install these modules.

There may also be Debian packages for this generation.

Documentation

You can learn about Topic Maps in general at

http://www.isotopicmaps.org/ (standards) http://kill.devc.at/taxonomy/term/22 (my blog)

http://topicmaps.bond.edu.au/ (tutorials, other stuff) http://easytopicmaps.com/ (tutorials, lotta links and hints)

http://astma.it.bond.edu.au/ (shorthand notation used by the authors)

For this particular package I also recommend the tutorials in

maps/tutorials.atm

Support

You can either

• mail to the author (rho@devc.at), or
• discuss this in one of the topicmap mailing lists, or
• find me in the freenode #topicmaps IRC channel, or
• create a bug entry in rt.cpan.org (preferred)

Copyright 200[1-8] Robert Barta, rho@devc.at

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.