This specification describes a serialization format for XML topic maps which has the property that all logically equivalent topic maps have the exact same byte-by-byte representation in this format. This can be used to test the conformance of XTM processors.

The specification describes the serialization of a topic map into an output document, but does not concern itself with where that topic map came from. It is NOT a goal to ensure that the canonical topic map can be successfully read into an XTM processor, but merely to confirm that all processing defined by the XTM 1.0 specification has been performed correctly.