Zope and ZTM 3 @ Topic Maps 2008

One of the most uplifting news at the Topic Maps 2008 conference was that Bouvet is working hard to finalize ZTM3, the topic maps engine for the Zope3 application framework.

ZTM3 is the long awaited update and improvement to its predecessor ZTM2 which is the basis for web sites like forskning.no and hoyre.no, and last but not least our own kuling.net.
One of the improvements Bouvet is working on, is making a user interface that is much more intuitive and easy to use for people who do not know the topic map standard, and at the same time powerful and flexible for developers, to make it easy to quickly develop stable and user friendly web applications.

ZTM3 is based on the Zope 3 platform, which is the newest version of the Python based web content management system, and will thus take advantage of the newest functionality incorporated in this version of Zope. ZTM3 is like Zope itself, open source, and therefore a good starting point for development and further extensions for making topic map based applications for both the private and public sectors.

The drawback with ZTM2 was that the documentation was nearly non existent, but this is said to be changed for the new version, something which will make it infinitely much easier to work with for both new and existing users of the ZTM engine.
ZTM3 is still not finished since there still is a lot to be done before relase, but when it is finsihed it is will reflect several years of experience in building topic map based applications.
The Cerpus staff is very positive and excited to see what new opportunities will be possible with the new version, and we look forward to building new good topic map mased applications after the positive experience we had building kuling.net

Tags: topicmaps, topic maps, ztm, zope, kuling.net