ZTM Topic Maps

The topic maps publishing system for the Zope framework

ZTM is an open-source system for maintaining a Topic Maps knowledgebase using well known content management techniques. Click up your ontology in a web browser, configure views and start publishing. It is written in Python and Javascript using Zope 3.

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Semantic technology

In contrast to traditional technologies, ZTM encodes meaning separately from data, content files and application code. Our goal is to reduce the amount of "hard wired" relationships.

What is ZTM?

ZTM is a project to build a user-friendly authoring system for Topic Maps using traditional content management techniques.

Users should not have to know how many angels can dance on the head of a topic in order to create and publish topic maps.

Topic Maps?

ISO Topic Maps is an international standard for the representation and interchange of knowledge, with an emphasis on the findability of information.

Of particular interest is the colocation objective: * When are two or more speakers talking about the same subject? (subject identity) * How to gather all the information about a subject in one place? (co-location)

Why use ZTM?

If you need to model and present complex domains or knowledge bases ZTM might be for you. All content is part of a topic map making its descriptive functionality inherent to every piece of information you add to your website.

By using well known techniques like workflow, schemas, and wizards, your contributors can collaborate through a web browser.

Usability is a big part of any success-story and ZTM does not require your contributors to be experts on the minutiae of knowledge representation. In fact we try hard to let the topic map paradigm fade into the background.

Features

• Publish text, images audio and video tied to flexible topic structures.
• Special design for subparts of web site.
• An ISO 13250-2: Topic Maps — Data Model (TMDM) engine
• Built-in search engine
• Customizable presentation
• Workspaces for collaboration and sharing of documents