What is it?
-----------
This base package contains Perl extension interfaces for Topic Maps

   http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/

With it you can

  - read/write XTM files
  - read/write AsTMa resources
  - manipulate and query topic maps via an API

See also for xtm.pl, a simple command line driven workbench.

Other packages of interest:

  - XTM::slides .... creating slides from topic maps

Prerequisites
-------------

Of course, XTM::base relies heavily on other Perl packages. Most
of them (hopefully all) should be resolved automatically if you
use the cpan frontend.

One notable thing is that XTM::base depends on finding an XML SAX
parser, so it depends on XML::SAX which ships with a Perl SAX parser.
It is good, but not the fastest.

  -  If you are using XML::LibXML (see KNOWN_ISSUES) then obviously
     the libraries have to be installed:

     For Debian users this is trivially done with 

       apt-get install libxml2
       apt-get install libxml2-dev

     The others can find sources (RPMs?) at

     http://www.xmlsoft.org/

  -  If you want to use the SAX version of Expat, install XML::SAX::Expat
     (see KNOWN_ISSUES).

Installation
------------

This module should be completely installable via the cpan frontend.
To build the extensions manually, unpack this distribution somewhere, and
exercise the usual incantation:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

You will need perl version 5.6.1 or better to install these modules.


Documentation
-------------

You can learn about Topic Maps in general at

  http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/ (XTM standard)
  http://topicmaps.bond.edu.au/ (tutorials, other stuff)
  http://easytopicmaps.com/     (tutorials, lotta links and hints)

You will find an overview in XTM::base, further documentation is embedded 
in the individual modules. Most of the Perl packages come with a POD 
description and there is also a docs directory in the distribution.

Support
-------

You can either

  - mail to the author (rho@telecoma.net)
  - discuss this in one of the topicmap mailing lists, or
  - create an bug entry in rt.cpan.org (preferred)




Copyright 200[1-2] Robert Barta, rho@telecoma.net

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.