rtm 0.2.1

Ruby Topic Maps (RTM)

RTM is a Topic Maps engine written in Ruby. See rtm.topicmapslab.de/ for instructions. Several backends and extensions are available as separate gems.

Overview

From a developer’s perspective, RTM is a schema-less database management system. The Topic Maps standard (described below) on which RTM is based provides a way of creating a self-describing schema just by using it.

Quickstart

require 'rtm'
connection = RTM.connect # uses the default Ontopia in-memory backend
topic_map = connection.create "http://example.org/my_topic_map/"
some_topic = topicmap.get!("identifier_of_the_topic")
some_topic["-"] = "default name for the topic"
topic_map.to_xtm("my_xtm_file.xtm")

Topic Maps

Topic Maps is an international industry standard (ISO13250) for interchangeably representing information about the structure of information resources used to define topics, and the relationships between topics. A set of one or more interrelated documents that employs the notation defined by this International Standard is called a topic map. A topic map defines a multidimensional topic space - a space in which the locations are topics, and in which the distances between topics are measurable in terms of the number of intervening topics which must be visited in order to get from one topic to another, and the kinds of relationships that define the path from one topic to another, if any, through the intervening topics, if any. In addition, information objects can have properties, as well as values for those properties, assigned to them. The Topic Maps Data Model which is used in this implementation can be found on www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-model/.

Backends

• rtm-ontopia: JRuby only, recommended, uses Ontopia: code.google.com/p/ontopia/

• rtm-tinytim: JRuby only, uses TinyTiM: tinytim.sourceforge.net/

• rtm-activerecord: uses a custom ActiveRecord schema

Extensions

• rtm-tmql: Adds support for the Topic Maps Query Language (TMQL), isotopicmaps.org/tmql/

• rtm-tmcl: Adds support for the Topic Maps Constraint Language (TMCL), isotopicmaps.org/tmcl/

License

Copyright 2009 Topic Maps Lab, University of Leipzig. Apache License, Version 2.0