TMAPI is an attempt to create a standard programming interface for accessing, manipulating and serialising topic maps. At the time of writing, topic map processing libraries exist for C, Java, Perl and Python, with multiple Java implementations being available. Each of these implementations has a different set of methods and objects and so a programmer is forced to relearn and to recode in order to move from one product to another. With a standard programming interface, it should be possible for a programmer to use any of the processing libraries available for their language of choice - and to write code which is portable from one library to another.
The TMAPI project was started late in 2001 as a collaboration between Empolis, Ontopia and Techquila - this first round of work resulted in a strawman "core" API - a simple Java API in which the main constructs of a topic map are represented as individual classes in the API.
Future work on TMAPI will seek to refine this core model and to develop it further to provide cross-library access to topic map parsing and serialisation services; indexing services; and to utility functions.
The TMAPI project is open to all and is hosted on Sourceforge - for more information on TMAPI, see the project homepage: http://www.tmapi.org
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