topicmap.com

Hand-crafted Machine-generated Knowledge Interchange

Topic map tools

Engines

Ontopia's free download (limited to 5000 topics, associations and occurrences) allows you to navigate topic maps in a generic interface. This allows you to quickly test the topic maps.
[free, java]

TM4JThe leading open source Topic map engine. It now supports both in memory and database stores as well as TMAPI. The project also has a home at Sourceforge where there is an active community of developers and implementors.
[free, java]

tmproc Geir Ove Grønmo's python implementation of ISO/IEC 13250. This was the first freely available topic map engine. It doesn't support XTM 1.0.
[free, python]

SemanText is a prototype application developed to demonstrate how the topic map standard (ISO/IEC 13250:2000) can be used to represent semantic networks. Semantic networks are a building block for artificial intelligence applications such as inference engines and expert systems. SemanText builds a knowledge base, in the form of a semantic network, from the topic map. New information can be added to the knowledge base and topic map automatically when the user defines rules which are used to infer new knowledge. All of this is done using constructs defined in the topic map standard.
[python]

GooseWorks.org Toolkit is a library for building applications that deal with various kinds of topic map information. Topic map information is - basically - data that makes statements about addressable resources, e.g. ISO Topic Maps, XTM, NewsML, RDF, DAML.The 'GooseWorks Toolkit for Topic Map Information Processing' is an implementation of the 'Topicmaps.net's Processing Model for XTM' and the correlated Graph3 API by Michel Biezunski and Steven R. Newcomb.

Perl XTM "With it you can (i) read/write XTM files, (ii) read/write AsTMa resources (iii) manipulate and query topic maps via an API"
[free, perl]

Tm4JScript
"The system runs stand-alone in a browser... The engine is based on reverse-engineering of xtm into an object model. It is a very straightforward design that uses indexes and hash tables to get performance. There are a number of useful methods that more or less make up for not having a query language. The system consists of the core engine, utilities code, and the editor app. A few other apps are also included in the distro."
[javascript]

tinyTIM
"tinyTIM is a very small easy to use (50kb jarsize) in memory Topic Map engine. It implements the TMAPI interfaces, so one can work with TopicMaps via the TMAPI standard. TMAPI will be what DOM is for XML."
[java]

XTM4XMLDB
"XTM4XMLDB is an implementation of the TMAPI for native XML - Database, which supports the XML:DB API. XTM4XMLDB is a TopicMap engine, which works with a native XMLDB as Backend. XTM4XMLDB is needed in XTMCMS a XTM ContentManagementSystem."
[java]

TMAPI/PHP
"TMAPI/PHP will implement an API for PHP based on the TMAPI (www.tmapi.org) project. This API will enable PHP developers easy and standarized implementation of topic maps in their applications. "
[php]

K-Discovery
K-Discovery, Knowledge Management with Topic Maps in Collaborative Environments, is the Ph.D. project of Stefan Smolnik. It is a framework with several components:

the Groupware-based Topic Map Engine
the Groupware-based Topic Map Modeler: A graphical tool to develop, configure, and maintain topic map templates.
the Groupware-based Topic Map Navigator: For a demo of "Semantic Surfer", log in with credentials of "GTM", "knowledge".

ZTM
"ZTM aims to enable distributed development and maintenance of 'topic map'-driven 'semantic' web sites by handling data model information items derived from the ISO 13250 Topic Map Data Model as managed content using the Zope CMF."
[python, zope]

Navigators / Applications / Visualisation

xSiteable xSiteable is a complete small-to-medium-size site development / prototyping kit created in XSLT, available on a number of platforms and operating systems. It has a simple Notation language for content called xSiteable Notation, utilizing Topic maps (XTM) for structure, binding and other assorted cleverness and the Sablotron XSLT parser for quick, reliable and powerful processing.
[free]

Topic Map Designer It's an editor and a graph viewer all rolled into one by Ronald Heckel, a student of Business Informatics at Dresden University of Technology, Germany.
[free, windows]

The 'V' Topic Map Browser The V browser is a prototype of an HTML topic map browser. It is written in Python and uses the GooseWorks toolkit as its backend.
[free, python]

GNOWSYS, Gnowledge Networking and Organizing System, is a web application for developing and maintaining semantic web content developed in Python and works as an installed product in Zope... GNOWSYS is a free software released under GNU GPL." GNOWSYS also supports XTM export.

Simple Topic Maps Management is a "simple Perl module that store Topic Maps on relational database. It is just a test version and it is still work in progress. It also has a simple built-in web interface to edit topic maps."

Panckoucke
"Panckouckeis a java library to support the developement of topic map presentation and navigation tools. Panckoucke is a subproject of tm4j and relies on it as its underlying topicmap engine. It integrates tmharvest, another subproject of tm4j, to support the automated creation of topic maps from structured data. Panckoucke is free and open-source (under the Apache Software Foundation license).

TM4Web/Velocity
"TM4Web/Velocity is a (TM4J) package for the processing of topic maps to HTML pages (or in fact any kind of text files). The package allows both an off-line batch transformation and an on-the-fly transformation as part of a web application. A sample web application and sample templates for offline and online HTML page creation are distributed as part of the package."

TM3D
TM3D visualises Topic Maps in 3D.

Thinkgraph
"ThinkGraph is a mix between a MindMapping appplication structured display of informations) and a 2D drawing application."

TM View
TM View is based on the i-Disc, developed by Tobias Hofmann, Hendrik Wendler and Bernd Froehlich: "a tool to interactively visualize and explore medium sized topic maps... Our system presents the topic hierarchy in a radial planar layout by encoding different hierarchy levels as separate rings. Associations are displayed on demand as three-dimensional arcs across the topic landscape. By separating these two topic map structures into different spatial dimensions, we untangle the often complex topic map graph."

HyperGrpah
HyperGraph can be used to visualise topic maps. "HyperGraph is an open source project which provides java code to work with hyperbolic geometry and especially with hyperbolic trees. It provides a very extensible api to visualize hyperbolic geometry, to handle graphs and to layout hyperbolic trees."

XSL

Nikita Ogievetsky of Cogitech has provided XSLT stylesheets for the transformation of the numerous existing XML DTDs for topic maps. The stylesheets are designed to convert topic maps from the syntaxes used by tools from Cogitech, Empolis, Infoloom, Ontopia and Techquila.com into the XTM syntax.
[free]

Stefan Mintert has also released xtm2xhtml: An XSLT program to produce XHTML from an XML Topic Map.
[free for non-commercial]

Metadata

MDF is an open source metadata framework from Kal Ahmed: "MDF is a combination of a simple approach to creating reusable modules for the processing of metadata and an implementation of that approach using Java". The framework has been designed to make it easy to trawl resources, extract and clean metadata and finally write them out as a topic map.
[free, java]

Authoring

LTM - linear topic map notation is a simple textual format for writing topic maps. Just like the XML exchange format it represents the constructs in the topic map standard as text, but unlike the XML format it is compact and simple. The notation can be written in any text editor and processed by topic map software that supports it, or converted into the XML format supported by such software.

AsTMa is "another pidgin language for Topic Maps" from Robert Barta. Features "static map authoring, only 'positive' information, similar to LTM, convertable to XTM"

Editors

TMTab is a tab-widget plug-in for Protégé which enables the use of Protégé as a topic map editing tool. The plug-in's current functionality is limited in that it only currently supports the export of XTM files from an ontology developed in Protégé which is based on the "topic map ontology" distributed with the plug-in, but it is flexible enough to allow the use of slots on Protégé classes to represent topic names, occurrences or to establish associations between topics.
[free]

ATop
TA-KT research group is developing a Topic Map Editor on top of TM4J.

Topincs
Topincs is a topic map authoring tool, that allows groups to create topic maps in Firefox and Opera. Even though it is run in an ordinary browser window it feels like an application installed on your computer. New technologies of the World Wide Web make this possible. It consists of a client, for editing maps and a server, for storing them.
[Apache 2, PHP, MySQL]

Wandora
Wandora is a general purpose knowledge extraction, management and publishing application based on topic maps. Wandora has been designed to enable easy aggregation, management and publishing of data and features rich data extraction, import and export capabilities. You are free to use Wandora in personal and non-commercial projects.

The Ceryle Project
"Ceryle is a free tool to help you get organized. If you use a lot of post it notes, are a writer, journalist, researcher, student, or anyone compiling a lot of information for a project, maybe just trying to organize your recipes, bookmarks, or your MP3 collection, Ceryle is designed to assist you in keeping track of things. Ceryle includes features to help you store, find and even visualize your information, using what is called a graph visualization."

TM4L Editor and Viewer
"TM4L (Topic Maps for e-Learning) is an authoring environment that supports the creation, maintenance, and use of ontology-aware courseware based on the ISO standard – Topic Maps. As an alternative to conventional authoring systems TM4L is aimed at facilitating the integration of already existing learning resources on the web. The TM4L Editor can be used also as a general Topic map development tool. It includes software developed by the TM4J Project."

mapalizer is a simple tool (written in Perl) for rapid topic map authoring.

Other stuff

dtddoc is a tool from Lars Marius Garshol which produces XTM documents describing DTDs.
[free, python]

Thinkgraph is a "mix between a 2D Drawing application and a Concept Map editor."