ISO/IEC 13250-6:2010

INTERNATIONAL ISO/IEC
STANDARD 13250-6
First edition
2010-11-15
Information technology — Topic Maps —
Part 6:
Compact syntax
Technologies de l'information — Plans relatifs à des sujets —
Partie 6: Syntaxe compacte
Reference number
©
ISO/IEC 2010
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ii © ISO/IEC 2010 – All rights reserved

Page
Contents
Foreword. iv

Introduction. v
1 Scope. 1

2 Normative references. 1

3 Syntax description. 1
3.1 About the syntax. 1

3.2 Deserialization. 1
3.3 Common syntactical constructs. 2

3.3.1 Whitespace. 2
3.3.2 Comments. 2

3.3.3 Creating IRIs from strings. 2
3.3.4 Creating IRIs from QNames. 3

3.3.5 IRI References. 3
3.3.6 Topic Identity. 3

3.3.7 Topic References. 4
3.3.8 Creating locators from wildcards. 4

3.3.9 Scope. 4
3.3.10 Reifier. 4

3.3.11 Type. 4
3.4 Literals. 4

3.4.1 General. 4
3.4.2 String Escape Sequences. 5

3.5 Topic Map. 6
3.6 Encoding Directive. 6

3.7 Version Directive. 6
3.8 Topics. 6
3.9 Topic Tail. 7
3.10 Occurrences. 7
3.11 Names. 7
3.12 Variants. 7
3.13 Associations. 8

3.14 Templates. 8
3.15 Template Invocation. 9

3.16 Directives. 10
3.16.1 Prefix Directive. 10

3.16.2 Include Directive. 10
3.16.3 Mergemap Directive. 10

Annex A (informative) CTM integer. 12

Annex B (informative) Syntax. 13

Bibliography. 14

© ISO/IEC 2010 – All rights reserved iii

Foreword
ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (the International Electrotechnical Commission) form
the specialized system for worldwide standardization. National bodies that are members of ISO or IEC participate in

the development of International Standards through technical committees established by the respective organization
to deal with particular fields of technical activity. ISO and IEC technical committees collaborate in fields of mutual
interest. Other international organizations, governmental and non-governmental, in liaison with ISO and IEC, also
take part in the work. In the field of information technology, ISO and IEC have established a joint technical committee,
ISO/IEC JTC 1.
International Standards are drafted in accordance with the rules given in the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2.

The main task of the joint technical committee is to prepare International Standards. Draft International Standards
adopted by the joint technical committee are circulated to national bodies for voting. Publication as an International
Standard requires approval by at least 75 % of the national bodies casting a vote.

Attention is drawn to the possibility that some of the elements of this document may be the subject of patent rights.

ISO and IEC shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent rights.

ISO/IEC 13250-6 was prepared by Joint Technical Committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, Subcommittee
SC 34, Document description and processing languages.

ISO/IEC 13250 consists of the following parts, under the general title Information technology — Topic Maps:

— Part 1: Overview and basic concepts

— Part 2: Data model
— Part 3: XML syntax
— Part 4: Canonicalization
— Part 5: Reference model
— Part 6: Compact syntax
iv © ISO/IEC 2010 – All rights reserved

Introduction
CTM (Compact Topic Maps) is a text-based notation for representing topic maps. It provides a simple, lightweight
notation that complements the existing XML-based interchange syntax defined in ISO/IEC 13250-3:2007 and can

be used for
— manually authoring topic maps;
— providing human-readable examples in documents;
— serving as a common syntactic basis for TMCL and TMQL.
The principal design criteria of CTM are compactness, ease of human authoring, and maximum readability. CTM
supports all constructs of ISO/IEC 13250-2, except item identifiers on constructs that are not topics.

This part of ISO/IEC 13250 should be read in conjunction with ISO/IEC 13250-2 since the interpretation of the CTM
syntax is defined through a mapping from the syntax to the data model there defined.

© ISO/IEC 2010 – All rights reserved v

INTERNATIONAL STANDARD ISO/IEC 13250-6:2010(E)
Information Technology — Topic Maps —
Part 6:
Compact syntax
1 Scope
This part of ISO/IEC 13250 defines a text-based notation for representing instances of the data model defined in
ISO/IEC 13250-2. It also defines a mapping from this notation to the data model. The syntax is defined through an
Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) grammar.
2 Normative references
The following referenced documents are indispensable for the application of this document. For dated references,
only the edition cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced document (including any
amendments) applies.
NOTE Each of the following documents has a unique identifier that is used to cite the document in the text. The unique
identifier consists of the part of the reference up to the first comma.
IANA-CHARSETS, CHARACTER SETS, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, 14 May 2007, available at

ISO/IEC 13250-2, Information technology — Topic Maps — Part 2: Data model
XSDT, XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes Second Edition, W3C Recommendation, 28 October 2004, available
at
IETF RFC 3986, Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax, Internet Standards Track Specification, January
2005, available at
IETF RFC 3987, Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs), Internet Standards Track Specification, January 2005,
available at
3 Syntax description
3.1 About the syntax
The acronym CTM is often used to refer to the syntax defined in this part of ISO/IEC 13250. Its full name is Compact
Topic Maps Syntax.
This clause defines the syntax of CTM using an EBNF grammar based on the notation described in XML 1.0. It uses
prose to define the mapping from CTM to ISO/IEC 13250-2. The full EBNF can be found in Annex A.
3.2 Deserialization
This clause defines how instances of the CTM syntax are deserialized into instances of the data model defined in
ISO/IEC 13250-2. Serialization is only implicitly defined, but implementations should produce CTM serializations that,
when deserialized to a new data model instance, produce a data model instance that has the same canonicalization
as the original data model instance, according to ISO/IEC 13250-4: 2009.
Each CTM instance shall produce a valid data model instance according to ISO/IEC 13250-2.
© ISO/IEC 2010 – All rights reserved
The input to the deserialization process is:
— An optional character set name according to IANA-CHARSETS which specifies the encoding of the CTM
instance.
— A byte stream which is converted into a character stream by the following steps:
— If the optional input character set name is provided, the encoding is set to the provided value.
— If the byte stream starts with EF BB BF (UTF-8 byte order mark), the encoding is set to "UTF-8".
It is an error if the encoding is already set to another value due to the optional character set name.
— If the next bytes in the stream contain the sequence 25 65 6E 63 6F 64 69 6E 67 (%encoding in ASCII),
all following 09 or 20 bytes are skipped until the very first 22 byte is read. The following byte sequence
until the next 22 (exclusive) byte is interpreted as character set name according to IANA-CHARSE
...