AsTMa= belongs to a set of languages which should support Topic Map engineering. The authoring language AsTMa= itself is optimized for human authoring, not so much for exchange of Topic Map documents between computers, as is XTM[xtm]. This implies that the language is rather non-orthogonal by design and follows much more a do-what-I-mean (DWIM) instead of a do-what-I-say approach.

As a consequence, AsTMa= processors have to develop some intelligence to guess what a human might expect in a particular situation. The structure of the language, though, tries to keep these ambiguities at a minimum. Furthermore, AsTMa= does not yet include all the syntactic options of XTM. All this ensures that maps authored with AsTMa= are only a fraction of the text size compared to those authored with XTM. The advantage for the author is that it is simpler to create maps with higher content consistency.

This version can be regarded as the stable version, AsTMa= being in production system and educational systems since 2001. For the changes relative to earlier versions please consult the appendix B.