The Goals For TMAPI

There are already a significant number of commercial and non-commercial topic map processing applications available. Each of these applications has a different programming interface, reflecting the slightly different ideas that each developer has had about the "best" way to represent the information in a topic map. For an application developer, this leads to non-portable code; the need to learn a new API for every topic map implementation he or she uses and the lack of a community of supporting developers.

TMAPI hopes to do for topic maps what SAX and DOM did for XML - provide a single common API which all developers can code to and which means that their applications can be moved from one underlying platform to another with minimum fuss.