To address some aspects of knowledge engineering with Topic Maps, the AsTMa* language family was created. The objective was to define a set of notations within one common concept framework and with a common mindset. This should provide all involved parties to have a migration path from topic map authoring up to transforming ontologies.

This common framework also makes it easier to provide a consistent underlying formalism and to define a coherent semantics on language constructs. In that the AsTMa* way of topic mapping will hopefully have few alignment problems between the individual sublanguages.

These sublanguages themselves are embedded within each other: the authoring notation AsTMa= is used by the constraint language AsTMa! and that, in turn, is part of AsTMa?, the querying and retrieval language. The fourth language AsTMa+ for updates is only available as idea-ware, so it cannot be discussed in great detail.