Introduction

Like most of the TM packages on the market, also the Perl TM distribution has gone through some evolution. Starting early 2000, my understanding of Topic Maps was strongly influenced by XTM, the XML notation for TMs. This has dominated - regrettebly - my first implementations which mirror strongly a structure as mandated by XTM.

With the experiences of a number of projects and some insights because of the TMRM discussions, a completely new distribution is currently bundled. One of the features it will sport is a new driver infrastructure which allows to transparently integrate external resources into a TM framework, simply by writing a driver. The application developer then uses a TM API - or probably better TMQL - to access all necessary information. Behind the scenes the TM infrastructure dispatches the accesses to the external resources, performs queries there and passes back the requested information as TM data.

One aspect to make this work is how an application engineer configures and manages topic maps on the top level. This is what this document is about; it should provide a technology preview, so the actual implementation may differ. I only use this document to bring everything into one coherent picture before actually fixing it up. As usual, I love to hear thoughts where this can be useful, or - conversely - where you think that this would not work.