The Topic Maps family of standards is designed to facilitate the gathering of all the information about a subject at a single location. The information about a subject includes its relationships to other subjects; such relationships may also be treated as subjects (subject-centric).

ISO/IEC 13250-2 (TMDM, Topic Maps Data Model) provides a foundation for syntaxes and notations, such as those defined in ISO/IEC 13250-3 Topic Maps XML Syntax and ISO/IEC 13250-4 Topic Maps Canonicalization. Of necessity, the TMDM makes ontological commitments in terms of how particular subjects are identified (topics, associations, occurrences), what properties are required, the tests to be used to determine whether two or more proxies represent the same subject, and other matters.

This Standard defines TMRM (Topic Maps Reference Model), which is more abstract and has fewer ontological commitments. Its purpose is to serve as a minimal, conceptual foundation for subject-centric data models such as the TMDM, and to supply ontologically neutral terminology for disclosing these. It defines what is required to enable the mapping of different subject-centric data models together to meet the overall goal of the Topic Maps standards, that each subject has a single location for all the information about it.

TMRM also provides a formal foundation for related Topic Maps standards such as ISO/IEC 18048 Topic Maps Query Language (TMQL) and ISO/IEC 19756 Topic Maps Constraint Lan- guage (TMCL).