Topic Maps
Topic Maps is an ISO standard designed to address the problem of Information Access Management. It is a generic, open standard for capturing knowledge in the form of topics (people, places, projects, companies etc etc), the connections between these topics (associations) and the relationship these topics have to pieces of information, such as web pages, documents etc.
Topic Maps can be used a way to better organise and find information over vast information corpuses as well as capturing the details and nuances of subtle knowledge models. From building richer information web sites through to aggregating and providing access to disperate information resources topic maps are a unique and powerful phenomenon.
Web Services
Web Services are becoming the architectural glue by which enterprises are integrating systems and information. The Topic Maps paradigm is the ultimate in information glue and in order to make this powerful capability available to developers the engine exposes it's core functionality as a Web Service.
The TMCore Web Service easily deploys in IIS to expose a simple, yet powerful, service that is based on work such as SNAPI (Semantic Network API), RDF Net API and TMRAP. Using this service developers can create, edit and query a topic map using a simple set of calls. The data structures returned from these operations can be seamlessly integrated into data feeds and web pages using standard XML processing tools such as XPath and XSLT.