With Ontopia, the most powerful and disseminated basic infrastructure for Topic Maps solutions has been open sourced on June 19, 2009. The Ontopia project offers a high performance and industry proofed tool stack for Topic Maps applications.

To establish the value of a common and shared development platform the Topic Maps Lab decided to integrate Ontopia in its prospective tool stack. With this step, the Topic Maps Lab will help bundling the available resources to push forward the development of Ontopia as far as possible. “Backed with the active support of Bouvet ASA, Oslo, the engagement of Space Application Services S.A., Zaventem, and our decision today, I’m very optimistic to attract others to join the Ontopia project. Together we will make Ontopia an important part of the semantic technology tool stack“, summarizes Lutz Maicher the good prospects of the Ontopia project.

With Hannes Niederhausen, the developer of the TMCL editor Onotoa, the Topic Maps Lab delegated its first official committer to the Ontopia project. The first contribution of the Topic Maps Lab is the TMAPI 2.0 support, which was committed to the Ontopia code base today. Within the next months, the Topic Maps Lab will continue its active work on Ontopia.

In the midterm the Topic Maps Lab will leverage the usage of Ontopia by providing new tools and components which will extend the current engine with new features. Thereby the main focus of the Topic Maps Lab is the development of convenient web technologies and information integration facilities.