TMCL will provide a means to express constraints on classes of topic maps conforming to the Data Model for ISO/IEC 13250:2002 Topic Maps. Its goal will be to provide a language such that a topic map can be said to be conforming to set of constraints. A topic map can be said to conform if it is successfully validated against the set of constraints. It may help optimization both of topic map storage and of TMQL queries based on schema information. It may aid applications in providing more intuitive user interfaces for creating and maintaining topic maps.

This document, split into three core sections, outlines the general requirements that the language should meet, provides technical use cases (these are data structure level use cases), and provides use cases that cater to the wider deployment of TMCL (such as illustrating how TMCL could be used in a document management solution to provide metadata authoring rigor).