Prerequisites
-------------

Of course, XTM::base relies heavily on other Perl packages. Most
of them (hopefully all) should be resolved automatically if you
use the CPAN frontend.

One notable thing is that XTM::base depends on the rather new
XML::LibXML which in turn needs the libxml2 libraries.

For Debian users this is trivially done with 

  apt-get install libxml2
  apt-get install libxml2-dev

The others can find sources (RPMs?) at

  http://www.xmlsoft.org/

Please let me know if I missed a point here.

Installation
------------

This base package contains Perl extension interfaces for Topic Maps

   http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/

To build the extensions, unpack this distribution somewhere, and
exercise the usual incantation:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

You will need perl version 5.6.1 or better to install these modules.

You will find an overview in XTM::base, further documentation is embedded 
in the individual modules.

Documentation
-------------

You can learn about Topic Maps in general at

  http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/ (XTM standard)
  http://topicmaps.bond.edu.au/ (tutorials, other stuff)
  http://easytopicmaps.com/     (tutorials, lotta links and hints)

Most of the Perl packages come with a POD description.

Support
-------

You can either

  - mail to the author (rho@telecoma.net)
  - discuss this in one of the topicmap mailing lists, or
  - create an bug entry in rt.cpan.org


Copyright 2001,2002 Robert Barta, rho@telecoma.net

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
