The Compact Topic Maps (CTM) is to be used as text-based representation of topic maps and describes a standardized interchange format of topic maps. The syntax is designed in a human-readable way and represents any information items and relationships between items modelled by the topic maps data model (TMDM) as simple text patterns.

The CTM writer provides the core functionality of exporting every topic map to CTM.
The Topic Maps Lab is proud to announce that the CTM writer implementation is now open source under the Apache Licence 2.0. The code is now available at Google code. For getting started we recommend you the documentation of the CTM writer.

In contrast to other implementations the CTM writer provides you the following benefits:

• The code is completely open source, available and can be modified
• The CTM writer works on top of the TMAPI and is independent of the real topic map engine implementation ( works with Ontopia, tinyTim etc. )
• The CTM writer supports the partial serialization of topic map fragments ( topics, associations etc. )
• The CTM writer supports additional features like prefix- and template-detection

The CTM writer is stable and production-ready. Nevertheless it is an ongoing project. We cordially invite all developers to use CTM writer in their projects and file issues if an unexpected behaviour or new ideas occur. Everybody with an deep interest in the further development of the CTM writer is invited to support the project.