Update 2009-10-01
The project website for H-Maps is now online. More information about H-Maps is available here. There is also a live installation of the H-Maps Navigator available here.

2009-09-25
Hölle&Hüttner a Tübingen, Germany based software company has developed H-Maps, a new Topic Maps framework with the main focus on collaborative editing and browsing of topic maps contents. We know the company from the last TMRA conferences, where we have seen interesting Topic Maps based solutions for the toxicology domain.

Within the last days the team of the Topic Maps Lab was invited to play around with the new framework. We are not allowed to reveal to much before the official release, but we can publish the first screenshots of H-Maps here.

The web based Topic Maps browser and editor is a Silverlight application. The frontend is customizable for specific application domains (ontologies). As far as we know, H-Maps is based on a completely new stack of Topic Maps infrastructure which was developed by the company from the scratch. We were not able to assess in detail whether the new engine implements all details of the Topic Maps standards. But it was assured to us that standard compliance was one of the development goals.

The development team from Hölle&Hüttner bespoke that the official release of H-Maps will be in some days and more information will be available at ideenscout.org. Today (2009-09-25) this URL is a simple redirect to the website of Hölle&Hüttner.