An Editor's draft version of The Standard Application Model for Topic Maps has been published for review. It has been produced under ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34: Information Technology - Document Description and Processing Languages. The document "defines the structure and interpretation of topic map information by defining the semantics of topic map constructs using prose, and their structure using a formal data model. This specification supersedes ISO13250 and XTM (XML Topic Maps); it is intended to become part of the new ISO 13250 standard. Topic maps are abstract structures which encode information about a domain and connect this information to information resources that are considered relevant to the domain. Topic maps are organized around topics, which are symbols representing real-world things, associations representing relationships between the things, and occurrences, which connect the topic map to information resources pertinent to the topics... It is expected that topic map implementations will have internal representations of topic map information that have a well-defined correspondence to the model defined in this document. This specification also defines a number of structural constraints and operations on the model, which implementations are expected to conform to."

Metamodel: The metamodel used in the draft document "is the same as that used by the XML Information Set [infoset]. A topic map's information set consists of a number of information items, each representing some part of the topic map. The information item's properties contain the information recorded about that part of the topic map. Every topic map information set must contain exactly one topic map information item."

From the document Introduction:

Topic maps may be represented in many ways: using topic map syntaxes in files, stored in databases, as internal data structures in running programs, and even mentally in the minds of humans. All these forms are different ways of representing the same conceptual structure, and it is this structure that is defined in this document, in the form of a data model.

A topic map processor is any software module that can process topic map information in conformance with this standard. It is assumed that the topic map processor does its work on behalf of another module known as the topic map application.

The process of exporting topic map information from such an internal representation to a topic map syntax is known as deserialization. The opposite process, that of building such a representation from information encoded using a topic map syntax is known as serialization. Specifications of topic map syntaxes are expected to define both processes in terms of the model specified in this document.