Limitations¶

• only a single <topicMap> is allowed in one instance, there is no support for multiple maps per document
• only a single scope is allowed for (base)names, occurrences and associations.
• In XTM 1.1 you cannot host XML content in occurrences.
• No reification support in 1.0 or 1.1.
• This package does not make any use of item identifiers.
• Relative URIs are NOT made absolute via the base URI where the map is loaded from. This may NOT be what a user ultimately wants. Also all URI canonicalization is skipped.
• The "xlink:type" attribute is completely ignored.

TODOs¶

• <mergeMap> is handled in 1.0, 1.1, but any scoping topic is ignored. This is related to the above.
• At this stage, you can only include other XTM instances with <mergeMap>, not AsTMa= or LTM. This may be fixed in the future.
• No variants are serialized or deserialized.
• Reification of topic map item is NOT supported.
• "isa" and "is-subclass-of" associations which are scoped (or reified) are not handled special yet.
• Suppress trivia might also suppress homepage << occurrence assertions.
• Relative URLs in "mergeMap" are not made absolute.

Methods¶

deserialize

This method takes an XTM string and tries to parse it. It will raise an exception on parse error. The if a "version" attribute exists, then the value

serialize

This method serializes the map object into XTM notation and returns the resulting string. It will raise an exception if the object contains constructs that XTM cannot represent. The result is a standard Perl string, so you may need to force it into a particular encoding.

The method understands a number of key/value pair parameters: